Online pharmacy fined Rs 2 lakh for unfair trade practice

NEW DELHI: Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) has imposed a Rs 2 lakh fine on online pharmacy PharmEasy for automatically renewing a three-month membership subscription for Rs 99 without obtaining explicit user consent. It said this design amounted to the “basket sneaking” dark pattern, an unfair trade practice, and directed the company to refund consumers who had not consented to the renewal.Although the company claimed it had discontinued this practice, the CCPA observed that the change was made only after the authority took up the case. “The corrective steps were reactive and undertaken only after regulatory intervention, which reinforces the seriousness of the initial breach,” the authority said, in its order.The regulator said the company engaged in the dark pattern known as ‘basket sneaking’, which involves pre-selecting or automatically adding paid options or services at the time of checkout without the explicit consent of the user, resulting in a misleading representation of the total payable amount. “….It undermines consumer autonomy and induces consumers to pay for a service they did not knowingly opt for,” CCPA saidThe authority took up the case suo motu after noticing that the platform was auto-adding a paid service to carts. It issued a show-cause notice in June to Axelia Solutions (PharmEasy’s operator).The company admitted that an “auto-addition” feature had been activated for certain users, while claiming that it applied only to existing subscribers and was in the process of being withdrawn. It said back-end changes would take 3-4 weeks, and later informed the regulator that the feature had been removed.CCPA found that nearly 24,000 subscriptions had been processed through this mechanism. The authority directed PharmEasy to discontinue the feature entirely and issue refunds to all consumers charged without explicit consent.