Choose your ramen, add a topping, fill your cart and confirm your order. Shortly afterwards, a rider appears on the map and is approaching home. Even the delivery notification arrives. At that point you can also open the door: . No restaurant cooked, no courier cycled, not a single euro came out of the card. And that was exactly the plan.
In South Korea, sites and apps have appeared that reproduce the gestures with great care online shopping and of food deliverystopping just short of the only thing an e-commerce usually cares about: selling something. They are called “dopamine sites” and allow you to choose products, fill carts, simulate payments and follow orders that will never arrive.
One of the most curious cases is 음식만안와요, which can be roughly translated as “only the food doesn’t arrive”. Its creator had presented the project on
You order dinner, the rider leaves and you have “saved” calories
In the meantime, the little experiment has also become an app. The official profile on Google Play describes 15 virtual restaurants and more than 40 dishes including chicken, ramen, pasta, sushi, pizza and malatang. You can change dimensions and toppings and even choose between faster or slower virtual delivery. Naturally order, payment and delivery never actually happen.
Once the fake delivery is finished, the app also calculates the calories that the user would have avoided eating. The developer herself presents it as a small device to interrupt the automation that leads to opening a delivery app almost without thinking. It’s best to take that number for what it is: a simulation. The app knows the dish virtually ordered, it cannot know if ten minutes later the person will eat something else or if he will actually open a delivery service.
The same mechanism has moved to shopping. SajaSaja looks like a normal online store, with login, catalog and cart, except for one rather relevant detail: all products are invented. The site clearly states that no payments or shipments are made. You can buy something that doesn’t exist for fun and receive, at most, the pleasure of having pressed the button.
SajaSaja himself claims to be inspired by the Japanese Kawkaw, a fake e-commerce that offers invisibility cloaks, creams to go back in time, shoes capable of changing gravity and hundreds of other equally indispensable items. Kawkaw also explicitly presents itself as a service designed to safely satisfy the desire for shopping without making actual purchases.
That “dopamine” in the name should be taken with some caution
The name works great. Maybe even too much. Just read “dopamine site” and your brain seems already explained: choose one thing, the dopamine rush arrives, you are happy and your bank account remains intact. Neurobiology is a little less tidy.
Dopamine participates in motivation, learning, and reward-seeking mechanisms, and research has long distinguished between the pleasure associated with an experience and the wantingthat is, the drive to desire and seek it. A study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry of 749 adults examined this difference for several potentially problematic substances and behaviors, including shopping.
In the participants, a wanting higher was associated with greater frequency, intensity and reported severity of problematic behaviors, while pleasure did not increase in the same way. However, the study was transversal and based on questionnaires: the authors themselves specify that .
A fundamental step is still missing regarding newborn dopamine sites: someone should study them directly. We therefore do not know whether simulating the checkout really reduces impulsive purchases over time or, for some people, keeps the circuit of signals, expectations and desires that precede a real expense switched on.
The two possibilities can even coexist. For those who open a delivery app out of habit, completing a fake order could become a kind of harmless deviation: same gesture, zero count. For a person who is very sensitive to shopping stimuli, continuing to browse catalogues, looking for offers and pressing “buy” could instead leave the desire perfectly trained. Research on problem behaviors shows just how much stimuli and anticipation of reward can have a bearing on “wanting” something. Applying this result directly to dopamine sites would be premature; ignore it, just as much.
Rather than stopping consuming, the act of consumption is consumed
Perhaps the most interesting part of these sites is right here. They took the product off e-commerce and discovered that there was still a lot to do. Scroll. Compare. Choose. Personalize. Add to cart. See the total figure. Confirm. Wait.
Consumption has also become an interfacea sequence of small gestures that can survive even when there is nothing to buy on the other side. SajaSaja brings it almost to a paradox: you can want a non-existent object, pay for it with non-existent money and have fun reading reviews from people who pretend to own it.
From here it takes us to transform dopamine sites into a cure for compulsive shopping, waste or binge eating. The platforms themselves present them above all as simulations and tools to interrupt an impulse; we don’t yet have data showing how many real purchases they actually manage to avoid. And there is also no serious basis for describing them as a habit of an entire South Korean generation: for now we have concrete projects, users, diffusion on social media and a format that has begun to travel much faster than research on what it produces. The cart, meanwhile, can be very full. The package remains empty. For once in e-commerce, it’s a feature and not a complaint.
