> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://conversion.club/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Dopamine Sites: The Mirror E-commerce Didn't See Coming - URL: https://conversion.club/dopamine-sites-the-mirror-e-commerce-didn-t-see-coming/ - Published: 2026-08-06T05:57:58.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-19T20:25:43.000Z - Author: Robin Marzin - Tags: ux, essay A "dopamine site" is a website or app that meticulously recreates the entire online shopping experience without a single real transaction. You pick products, fill a cart, pay with a bank card that exists nowhere, then watch a delivery driver move across a map in real time until a message announces that everything has arrived. Yay 🙌 **No product will ever arrive, yet millions of users return to these platforms every day to place fake orders.** The trend appeared last year in South Korea. It took a few months to cross borders, but it did so with enough force to fill the columns of several media outlets here too in June, from Slate to France Info and much of the mainstream press. Most of the articles looked alike: an amused discovery of an internet gadget, a quick explanation of the mechanism, a raised eyebrow, then on to the next topic. ![Visual "Dopamine rush": the amused discovery of an internet gadget](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632106.jpg) Dopamine rush A few more serious headlines, particularly in the American press, dug a little deeper, asking therapists what these sites say about a generation worn out by the cost of living and looking for thrills without consequences. --- > **But even those pieces stayed focused on the individual who clicks, never on the industry that has spent twenty years learning how to make people click.** --- This surface-level coverage missed the essential point: what these sites say about our industry, our jobs, and the way we have built the shopping experiences of millions of users for years. ## "It's not about the arrival, it's about the quest" Dopamine. The word got thrown around everywhere this summer, but rarely explained. The famous "pleasure or reward molecule" is a chemical messenger that carries information between certain types of neurons. **In practical terms, it's the signal your brain sends to tell you it's satisfied.** Yet studies show that dopamine is not released when you receive something, but when you anticipate it. Anticipation makes the most noise in the brain: the progress bar moving forward, the little delivery driver getting closer on the map, long before the box arrives and, most of the time, disappoints a little. The press gave a name this summer to the slump that follows delivery: the "post-purchase crash." We had already analyzed this phenomenon in an article from a much more down-to-earth angle: the checkout funnel and what happens once the order is confirmed. [Optimizing the e-commerce post-purchase experience: the complete auditComplete e-commerce post-purchase audit: post-payment offer, confirmation, delivery and repurchase, with real data from thousands of orders.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/icon-ghost-47e80877-7263-4bdb-933f-296a2a1c8333.png)Conversion Club | Média CRO et e-commerceJérémie Werner![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/76b722d7-3260-4534-889f-ea4e51994b08-e823d208-20d5-4af1-a544-9bb56f6edd1f.webp)](https://conversion.club/how-to-optimize-post-purchase-in-e-commerce-the-complete-audit/) --- > **Twenty years of e-commerce have refined this mechanism without really hiding it, in the name of an ever smoother, ever more engaging experience.** --- What we more readily forget is that, for a sizable share of the public, shopping online can slide from pleasure into something that looks like addiction. A design approach with few scruples, one that applies the sum of more or less "best practices," can make a social feed endless or a mobile game hypnotic. The same approach keeps the checkout funnel gripping, cart after cart, notification after notification. Filling a cart you never intended to pay for, late at night, with no goal other than easing a bit of tension, is nothing exotic or Korean. Most teams building e-commerce sites already see this number in their analytics: the cart abandonment rate, which we always explain with logistics or price, and rarely with what it also is, much of the time: a session that was never meant to end in payment. ![Screenshot of a dopamine site: a sensory experience with no payment](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Capture-du-04-08-2026-a---09.22.13.png) Sensory experience ## We already knew, without wanting to see it Besides, there was no need to wait for these Korean sites to observe this behavior at full scale. In online fashion, a significant share of shoppers practice what the industry calls **bracketing**: ordering three sizes or three colors of the same item while knowing full well, at the moment of payment, that two out of three will come back. [Narvar](https://corp.narvar.com/resources/2022-returns-policy-benchmark?ref=conversion.club) puts this practice at 63% of shoppers, a figure that explains why returns have become the quietest, and often the heaviest, expense in the entire industry. On a base of 40,000 returns a year, logistics handling alone already swallows several hundred thousand euros, not counting product depreciation or the service time needed to process each return. [E-commerce return rate: how to reduce it without killing your salesIn fashion, 20-30% of orders come back. Find out where the return rate comes from, how to isolate it by size and how to manage it without hurting your sales.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/icon-ghost-9883e659-d0b0-4e8d-b6fd-ca56127647a6.png)Conversion Club | Média CRO et e-commerceJérémie Werner![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/b6dfb392-930b-40a0-bee7-f714053bf0af-b8dfbd33-73f8-4468-ab80-1b482613d3fa.webp)](https://conversion.club/fashion-e-commerce-return-rate-how-to-cut-it-without-killing-your-sales/) The **wardrobing** habit, wearing a garment just once and then returning it as new, follows exactly the same logic: the clothing provides a one-time, almost experiential service, and keeping it was never the plan. We've measured these behaviors in our own dashboards for years, without always naming them for what they are. In their quiet way, they already foreshadowed what dopamine sites now put on full display: part of the act of buying is less about owning than about the sensation that comes with it. --- > **Bracketing and wardrobing tell, between the lines, the same story these sites tell out loud, and much more forcefully.** --- ## Join the club The community of e-commerce brands. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Clear, concrete, actionable content. Unsubscribe in one click. ## What could we have eaten tonight? [FoodNeverComes](https://foodnevercomes.com/?ref=conversion.club) faithfully recreates the experience of a meal delivery app. ![FoodNeverComes, a recreation of a meal delivery app](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632108-1.jpg) The original fake food experience You browse dishes from twelve countries, flags included, customize your order down to the last topping, pay with a pre-filled bank card that never existed, then watch a little scooter move across a map in real time until the final announcement: Delivered. The counter on the homepage, zero cravings satisfied, zero euros spent, sums up the whole contract with the user: the entire ritual, without ever spending a cent. For every dish you flip through in its Trending now section, the site even offers a free recipe to make it yourself. It also links to a sister site dedicated to quitting bad habits, as if the interrupted impulse had to find a way out somewhere else, even if that means dealing with both the hunger and the guilt that sometimes comes with it. ![FoodNeverComes screen: order almost at your door (1/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632109.jpg) ![FoodNeverComes screen: order almost at your door (2/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632110.jpg) ![FoodNeverComes screen: order almost at your door (3/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632111.jpg) Almost at your door ## "Act like money grows on trees" !["Shop like crazy" screen of a dopamine site imitating a store](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632112.jpg) Shop like crazy [Dopamine-Shopping](https://dopamine-shopping.com/?ref=conversion.club) goes even further in its resemblance: the site copies the structure, the brands and even the product pages of a real store, with prices, star-rated customer reviews and small discounts underlined in red. A few clicks apart, you come across a Rolex watch, a LEGO box and sports leggings, just like on any marketplace, except that here the displayed budget is unlimited. Every purchase goes into a space called Inventory rather than a standard customer account, and one click on Generate my dream order is enough to see a fictional delivery driver show up within minutes. The homepage hides nothing of its intent: "shop like crazy, pay absolutely nothing." It offers every shopping signal, down to the little day and night switch in the corner of the screen, without ever letting a single real transaction into the story. ![Complete dopamine site journey through to checkout (1/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632113.jpg) ![Complete dopamine site journey through to checkout (2/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632114.jpg) ![Complete dopamine site journey through to checkout (3/3)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Group-632115.jpg) The site offers a complete journey, all the way to checkout. ## What the copy says about the original These two sites borrow, often feature for feature, the codes we refine every day in our own line of work: reassurance, urgency, personalization, real-time tracking, light gamification of the journey. Pulled out of their original commercial context, these same codes take on a strange, almost unsettling tone, the feeling you get watching a Black Mirror episode where a perfectly familiar object ends up tipping into the absurd. The experience stays standardized from start to finish, with its set pieces and its marked-out path like any checkout funnel, except that it's twisted until it becomes disturbing. --- > This shift deserves to be read both ways, rather than from just one side of the story. --- ![Visual "Playing with fire": a checkout funnel twisted until it becomes disturbing](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b5/a7/b5a79c8d-ed77-4459-9729-b694bd04720c/content/images/2026/10/Capture-du-04-08-2026-a---10.22.27@2x.png) Playing with fire On one hand, it confirms something many CRO practitioners have long known without always managing to get across: **the experience built around a product has its own value for the person going through it, separate from the product itself.** The fact that people voluntarily come back, day after day, to a site that never delivers anything says a lot about the real weight of that experience in the buying decision. It's a reminder that what we build every day is worth as much to our audiences as what we sell them. On the other hand, this same shift is a reminder that a mechanic designed with care and empathy, refined through tests on real samples of users, can become a trap or a source of distress for part of the audience, without anyone in the design chain ever intending it. Ordering a meal you know you'll never receive may say something broader about our relationship with digital and our times, though there's no need to open a philosophical debate here that falls outside this media's remit. > **What this act reveals is a need for guidance, listening, power and freedom in the act of buying, a need for advice that the industry has at times exploited more than served.** ## Join the club The community of e-commerce brands. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Clear, concrete, actionable content. Unsubscribe in one click. ## What now? In many ways, the signal sent by dopamine sites remains unsettling, and it will probably stay that way for a while. **At the same time, it is a reminder of the considerable responsibility brands carry toward their users.** The stakes are many, and building lasting trust between an audience and a brand falls squarely within what CRO must deliver today: building, iteration after iteration, smooth and meaningful experiences that give every interaction and every piece of content a clearly readable intent. At a time when artificial intelligence makes synthesis, uniformity and borrowing recipes from elsewhere almost too easy, this demand for meaning loses none of its value. If anything, it gains. An experience designed with precision for a specific audience is never just a formula you copy. That uniqueness is exactly what will keep setting apart a brand that captures attention for a moment from one that builds a real relationship over time.