An online experiment on consumers' susceptibility to fall for post-transaction marketing scams

Post-transaction marketing offers are often designed to trick consumers into purchasing products they would not want. To increase the frequency of transactions, retailers use strategies such as subscribing consumers by default to offers, camouflaging post-transaction offers as part of primary transactions, and being unclear about the terms of the offer. Further, sharing agreements for personal consumer data and payment credentials between first and third-party retailers violate consumers' expectations about privacy and business conduct. Some of these tactics have been mitigated in the United States with the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA). In this paper, we report the results from an online post-transaction marketing experiment. We involve over 500 consumers in a purchasing episode (i.e., a functional mock-up music store) followed by a post-transaction marketing offer with low value to consumers. In the experiment, we systematically vary important design characteristics on the offer page, and collect additional data through a post-experimental questionnaire. We investigate which factors are most predictive of acceptance of the low-value post-transaction offer. We find that ROSCA's interventions are a step in the right direction and should be considered by European regulators, but do not go far enough.