Shoes by ThreadTheory. Snacks by CrunchCove. Gadgets by SkyScribe. They’re all for sale on FakeHaul.com, a new competitor to online marketplaces like Temu. They offer the same bottom-of-the-barrel prices and massive selection of products. The only difference? None of the brands, products, or prices on FakeHaul are real—and that’s entirely by design.
FakeHaul is meant to replace sites like Temu, not by offering better products or lower prices, but by offering no products at all. Instead, it merely offers the experience of online retail, scratching the same itch as a shopping spree without costing users a cent.
The rise of dopamine sites
FakeHaul is the latest arrival in the “dopamine site” category, an emerging genre of apps that aim to give users the same dopamine release as online shopping, without costing them any money. You can fill up your cart, make customizations, hunt for deals, and even check out, all without actually purchasing any products or providing personal information like a shipping address or a payment method.
The site was created by Jack Yang, a software developer working on AI at Microsoft. FakeHaul was a passion project for Yang, inspired by someone in his life who struggles with impulse shopping.
“I noticed the satisfaction mostly happened before the purchase: in the browsing, the comparing, the adding to cart, and the waiting for delivery,” Yang tells Fast Company over email. “I wanted to see if that ritual could be separated from the financial consequence.”
Later in development, Yang took cues from FoodNeverComes, a similar dopamine site that mimics food delivery apps like DoorDash. There’s also Dopamine Shop, a shameless imitation of Amazon, and No Smoke Zone, a cigarette simulator that aims to curb cravings for nicotine rather than online shopping.
“The dopamine-site stuff helped me realize this was a broader behavior and gave me language for it, but the personal use case came first,” Yang explains. “FoodNeverComes does it for a single fake delivery; FakeHaul runs the whole shopping loop.”
Though Yang first experimented with showing real products from brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton on the site, he swapped them out for AI-generated substitutes to avoid legal trouble when FakeHaul went live. In the first two days of the site being live, the site garnered 550 pageviews from 100 visitors—a small group, but one that showed genuine interest and follow-through on the site’s features.
“A good share of people who landed went deep into the funnel rather than bouncing off the joke, which is the behavior I was hoping for,” Yang said.
A solution, or a new problem?
While FakeHaul was designed to replace addictive shopping sites like Temu and Shein, it contains some habit-forming features of its own. There’s a once-a-day wheel spin to unlock a coupon and a shareable receipt after completing a fake order, showing how much money a user saved by shopping on FakeHaul instead of a real online store.
Yang admits that he was conflicted about adding those features to FakeHaul. From his perspective, the receipt system “is meant to flip the usual reward” of online shopping, letting users show pride in how much they didn’t spend. “Making it shareable was an attempt to make restraint feel like the thing worth showing off,” he adds.
The coupon wheel is “the more ethically complicated piece,” Yang says. “Yes, it’s built to bring people back, but ideally as the thing you open when you feel the urge to open Temu or Shein instead. Capping it at once a day was a small guardrail, so the substitute doesn’t quietly become another endless loop of its own.”
“The gap between parodying an engagement loop and simply running one is thin, and I’m not completely sure which side I land on,” he continues. Yang has already received mixed feedback on the efficacy of FakeHaul. The user he first designed the site for says it helps her: “She feels the urge, browses and ‘buys’ on FakeHaul, and it passes without a real purchase,” Yang shares.
But others struggling with compulsive online shopping feel the opposite. When Yang went to the moderator of a subreddit for shopping addicts and asked if he could share FakeHaul with its users, he was shut down. The moderator explained that “rehearsing the buying ritual can reinforce the loop that people in recovery are trying to break, and a fake hit might not be a clean substitute,” instead sending them back down the rabbit hole of shopping addiction.
“That’s why I keep calling this an entertainment product with an open question inside it and not a treatment. I don’t have enough users yet to say which view the evidence backs,” Yang says. “If an overwhelming amount of people say it becomes a warm-up [rather] than a healing ritual, I have a kill switch to shut the site down because it was not my original intention.”
