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Comment by 734129837261 | Hacker News Reader

I remember doing A/B testing on this for a multinational multi-billion dollar company's website. The learning was to never surprise the customer. Show the sum total before they even get to the checkout process. And stay true to it.

What proved conclusively positive was adding a discount to the checkout process (a time-limited one did not prove successful). Just to make the customer feel that they're getting a good deal.

Once the customer was on the checkout form we'd display: "This product is almost out of stock," and when they for some reason come back to the product page or listing, we'd show: "43 people are looking at this product."

Which created a sense of urgency. This strategy wasn't legal in all countries, because it was 100% fake, but it worked wonders where it could be displayed.

Customer satisfaction skyrocketed, so... evil as it might be, it only created happy people.

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>43 people are looking at this product.

Hotels.com and a couple other websites were doing that to me the other day. I had a feeling it was bogus.

You did have me at discount. I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time. If it’s a brand I haven’t heard of or bought previously it’s much lower.

>I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time.

But if you get a discount a non-negligible amount of the time, you may stop buying unless you're getting the discount. The discounted price will become the 'true' price.

"I had a feeling it was bogus."

I've always ignored those sorts of things entirely, on the theory that I don't believe the entities in question are capable or willing to put the engineering effort to provide a number accurate to two significant digits at scale.

Also the numbers are often implausibly large. If there's "one" of an item left and "43 people" are "currently looking" at it, then the problem isn't that I need to hurry up and buy it, the problem is that you've utterly failed at one of your basic tasks, stocking correctly for demand. In general, businesses are actually really good at that; it's literally life and death for them, so the idea that every single thing on their site is just on the verge of selling out unless you get it now is just absurd.

I've been trying to train myself to ignore "discounts" too, unless I can prove to myself that there really is a difference between the "real" price and the "discounted" price and there is some specific reason that I'm getting the latter. Or to put it another way, "customers in general" don't get discounts. You can get a discount if you are "a price discriminating customer willing to hunt for coupon codes", or "a friend of the proprietor", or something specific, but you are never just handed a discount. Those discounts are discounts... they're just the price.

Yes, this boils down to just writing good copy or creating a sales page / environment that's honest.

Everything you do from start to finish in the sales process needs to be believable. Like in a sales page, if you admit that you screwed up and ordered 100,000 sunglasses instead of 10,000 and now you want to get rid of them at whole sale prices, suddenly if you sell $39 glasses for $14.99 it's believable that this really happened and it's a good deal, so the discount makes sense.

Now of course that could all be a lie and they cost $5 and they really wanted to sell them for $15 so they cooked up a total bullshit story but something like that is a lot more believable than trying to throw up a bunch of high pressure sales tactics based on scarcity. Picking out those lies really comes down to your reputation too, which is why sites that offer 24/7 discounts have no credibility.

Basically, just be honest and it's hard to go wrong.

Stores have gotten into trouble for not selling items at their list price. Kohls always has half their items on sale and half regular price - they know you won't buy the regular price item when the sale item is nearly identical. They rotate items in and out of sale every week just so they can prove in court there actually is a half off sales.

Depends on your country, but in the US you can't claim something has a regular price if the regular price is never charged for it.

I spoke to someone actually at Hotels.com about this urgency messaging. The number isn't fake.

Good to know. It was never hilariously high like 43. It would say 5-10 or so.

> What proved conclusively positive was adding a discount to the checkout process ... Just to make the customer feel that they're getting a good deal.

Definitely guilty of this, if I'm on the fence about a purchase, finding a discount code (Honey extension is great) can often make the difference. Even knowing that the discount is probably baked into the price

This is booking.com in an nutshell

Yeah, this sounds a lot like booking.com. It's obvious that they've relentlessly tuned their purchase flow to make it as seamless as possible.

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