Dopamine sites, a South Korean genre of fake storefront that reproduces the shopping ritual without the shopping, let visitors search for products, read reviews, fill a cart, enter a delivery address, and place an order they can then track, except nothing arrives and no money moves, according to Itika Sharma Punit at Rest of World. Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes are two of them, and they surfaced in a market where online retail, food delivery, and digital payments are already routine. Researcher Shriram Venkatraman said the behavior isn’t distinctly Korean, since people everywhere window-shop and park items in carts they never buy, but formalizing it into a service is. Consumer anthropologist Helen Jambunathan said the sites expose shopping as emotional rather than transactional.
