The furore over Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI transactions has brought back into focus other charges that run counter to the idea of catalysing India’s digital push. These include platform fees and convenience charges, which have become an industry-wide practice across online services spanning food and grocery delivery, e-commerce, entertainment and travel.Compounding this are so-called ‘dark patterns’ used by online platforms, which can further obfuscate the real price a consumer has to pay, including by revealing charges late in the checkout process or adding services without explicit consent. What started small – as an experiment by Swiggy three years ago with a modest Rs 2 per transaction add-on – has since become standard practice across major food and grocery delivery platforms, including Zomato and Blinkit. Even Amazon India now charges customers Rs 5 for servicing on most orders.The charges now cut across almost every major category of online consumption. Ordering food on Swiggy or Zomato attracts a platform fee; buying goods on Amazon India comes with a marketplace fee; booking a movie on BookMyShow attracts an internet handling or convenience fee; booking a train ticket through IRCTC comes with a convenience fee; and similar charges are imposed by airlines and online travel aggregators when customers book flights.That spread is significant given how online transactions have evolved from being an alternative to physical channels into the default mode of accessing many of these services. Food delivery is inherently an online business, while a large majority of reserved railway tickets are now booked digitally. Movie and flight bookings, too, have steadily shifted online. Yet, rather than the cost of transacting digitally getting subsumed within the price of the underlying service, a separate layer of charges has increasingly become standard across these sectors.Paying for ‘convenience’Far from remaining small add-on charges, both platform and convenience fees have become significant revenue streams for the companies that levy them.IRCTC collects convenience fees on e-ticket bookings at the rate of Rs 15 + GST per ticket for non-AC classes and Rs 30 + GST per ticket for AC classes. For users who make online payment for e-tickets through the BHIM/UPI payment mode, the fee is slightly reduced to Rs 10 per ticket for non-AC classes and Rs 20 along with applicable GST for AC Class. IRCTC says the reduction for these specific payment modes is to “promote digital payments, thereby fulfilling the Digital India mission of the Government of India”.Also Read | How new rules are set to change your online shopping experienceIn the June 2026 quarter, IRCTC made Rs 248 crore from convenience fees, accounting for over 18% of the company’s total revenue in the period, which stood at Rs 1,369 crore, but more than 68% of the platform’s Rs 361 crore revenue from e-ticketing services. Though Swiggy and Zomato do not report specific breakdowns of how much they earned from platform fees, industry analysts estimated that each company makes roughly Rs 1,000 crore to Rs 1,200 crore from these charges annually.Story continues below this adBut these charges present multiple contradictions. Take platform fees, which jack up the final pricing of products while obfuscating their real cost until the final step of checkout. Similarly, convenience fees represent an inflated add-on charge, even as an online transaction actually saves the company offering the service both costs and resources on things such as physical staff and brick-and-mortar infrastructure.“The word convenience charge itself is an anomaly, given that it is the service provider who is benefiting by offering that service online. Say, ticket sales: instead of needing to have a physical counter with staff to see tickets, the entire thing is now happening online. It’s a gain for the service provider. Instead, the customer is saddled with an additional charge even though the service provider is benefiting by offering it the digital way. That is ironic,” a retired chief of a technology regulator told The Indian Express.What changes from headline price to final billThen there is the question of how and at what stage these additional charges are disclosed to a consumer.In Explained | Annoying pop-ups you can’t get rid of: Why Govt is going after ‘dark patterns’The Department of Consumer Affairs had earlier intervened after receiving complaints against e-commerce platforms charging extra for cash-on-delivery, a practice classified as a dark pattern that misleads and exploits consumers. On these charges, there is a certain policy ambivalence.Story continues below this adIn August, India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) observed that quick commerce firm Zepto was showing a lower price initially to lure consumers, but adding additional handling charges and applying a fee for its membership plan without customers’ consent. Calling this a case of ‘basket sneaking,’ the CCPA imposed a fine of Rs 7 lakh on Zepto and directed it to discontinue its dark patterns.Essentially, dark patterns on e-commerce are deceptive user-interface designs that trick shoppers into making unintended purchases or sharing data. Basket sneaking is a deceptive design tactic where an e-commerce platform automatically adds an extra product or service to users’ shopping carts without their explicit consent, usually through pre-checked boxes, hidden line items, or forced bundles during the checkout process.In the online ticketing sector, the price initially shown to a consumer can change over the course of the booking process.Also Read | Indians lose up to Rs 28,000 crore per year to dark patterns; Nykaa, BigBasket among worst offendersTake travel aggregator Yatra. A search for a flight ticket first shows all available options along with the cost. Upon clicking a suitable option, the following page that loads gives a breakdown of the fare, which includes the base fare, fuel surcharges, user development fees, and GST.Story continues below this adUntil here, there is no mention of the so-called convenience fee that Yatra.com charges, and it is only revealed on the subsequent page when a user clicks on ‘proceed to pay’. So, it takes three webpages to load, and right when a user has to input her payment details does the website reveal an added convenience charge. This is not a Yatra-specific strategy, but is prevalent across the sector and platforms like MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, among others.This strategy is commonly referred to as ‘drip pricing’. India’s Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023 define it as a practice where elements of prices are not revealed upfront or are revealed surreptitiously within the user experience; or revealing the price post-confirmation of purchase, i.e. charging an amount higher than the amount disclosed at checkout.In short, drip pricing is a deceptive sales tactic where companies advertise only a low initial ‘headline price’ and then reveal mandatory fees, taxes, or service charges incrementally (‘dripping’ them) as the customer moves through the checkout process.