Nobody can give you shipping charges without knowing your address. The credit card step exists because most of the time the billing address and shipping address are the same.

It depends really. Amazon.com, no of cause not, the US is huge for small countries, you do know the shipping cost.

I work for a company that has seven webshops, in six countries. We work out how much it will be to ship an item, on average and just include it in the price of the product. If the customer orders multiple item, we save a bit of money on shipping for that order. So in our case, because one webshop only shipping within one country, we always have a shipping cost of zero (it no zero of cause, it's factored into the product price, but it easier to figure out the actual cost of a purchase ).

I've been their customer for ages, surely they could've worked it out.

It depends on what shipping address you use though. An online vendor could probably be sued for false advertising if they showed one shipping price, but then changed it later because a customer decided to use a new shipping address.

Hmm, I am paying here on amazon.de with direct bank transfer, and it shows shipping costs even directly on the article page as long as I'm logged in.

Why is that?

Denmark is much smaller than USA, so the shipping cost doesn't depend much (or any) on your actual address/postal code.

I have a few addresses in my amazon account, and post to one 99% of the time. It shouldn't take a genius to figure that out.

And misquote to you 1% of the time? That would open them up to a fraud claim 1% of the time.

Billing address won't change the shipping address.

And if I'm sending a gift to an address that isn't already in my account?

Ship cost estimates are far more difficult than just making an assumption about where it will be shipped to. You just flat out can't quote a shipping cost unless you know for sure what the address is, or else the act of quoting shipping can actually be considered fraudulent. They get the delivery address at the same stage as the payment information because it allows for an easy "Shipping address is same as billing address" option.

For anyone that is too skeptical about entering payment information before seeing shipping costs, there is an option to estimate your shipping costs beforehand. It requires more work though, which is why it is an optional step.

For the shipping charges, it used to be like you say, but since some time now, if I go to the basket, a little below the "Proceed to Checkout" button there is an "Estimate VAT, Postage and Packaging" option.

Nice one, did not know that. Thank you.

What is also confusing "Dispatch to this address" button. Am I going to pay now with no return? When do I get the actual price?

The first I agree with, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Sneaking in Prime".

"Fucked up search" is almost certainly not deliberate. I suspect it costs them a good deal of sales when people cannot find what they wanted to purchase. I don't think you can call that an 'dark pattern' unless it is deliberate and they are working some sort of angle.

It means they try to trick you into joining Prime, every time you make a purchase.

Case in point:

Yesterday my wife made a small purchase on Amazon. In the evening, I was checking our shared credit card statement and noticed that there were two charges from Amazon. One was for the amount of her purchase. The other was for $1.00 and said "Amazon Prime".

I went to my wife and asked her, "Did you mean to sign up for Amazon Prime?"

Her reply: "What is Amazon Prime?"

We then had to go into her Amazon account and manually cancel a service we didn't want that would have silently billed us $99 in 30 days.

Now, you could say, that perhaps my wife did not clearly read every word of every screen that was presented to her during the checkout process. But shouldn't it have been obvious? My wife literally had no idea she signed up for something that costs $99, by accident, all while making an $11 purchase.

I don't think it's possible to argue that this is an accident. Amazon clearly knows what they are doing, and it is by design.

I don't know what GP meant, but maybe Amazon is aiming for a spot where it's easy to find something that fits the bill, but hard to find the cheapest thing that fits the bill. That's generally been my experience with their search, anyway.

Exactly.

Also they tend to search for synonyms, which sometimes returns ridiculous amount of results.

I agree with the f*ed up search comment, assuming you mean they sort by how it affects their bottom line.

But if that's the worst of their 'dark patterns', then the experience of shopping on their website is one of the better ones.

also defaults to non-free shipping at least some times...

I wonder why they purposely fuck up the search... is it to prioritize shipped from amazon products (sort by new and popular is one example)?