Scarcity tactics can anger customers
tips.ariyh.com
tips.ariyh.com
That's legitimately horrifying. I've never had the misfortune of experiencing it, but now I know - if a salesman ever tries to pull that tactic on me, then instant threat to call the police.
I was at a Honda dealer once, having owned Honda and Acura cars in the past, and thinking about a hybrid. I said something to the salesman about Honda hybrid drivetrains being second rate, engineering wise, compared to Toyota, even though I generally liked Honda vehicles in other respects.
I was startled when he seemed to take it really personally. It didn't seem like he was just acting angry - I can't see what the use of that would be.
WTF? I would never buy anything from someone who's getting angry at me. If the sales experience is that bad, what can I expect from customer support later? Threaten me not to open any support ticket?
Now I permanently associate exploding offers with long-term dissatisfaction of the product.
Plus if I reflect and later decide I do want what you're offering, then I know your "full" price is bullshit and your "special" rate probably is too, so I'll come in negotiating hard, both because I've learned something about your prices and because now I kinda don't like you.
Salespeople pull this crap with all kinds of things that don't really have any actual time-pressure on them, though. Home remodeling, various services, unremarkable (that is: not unique or highly in-demand) cars. In fact, "we're running a special that'll get you 10% off if you sign today" is usually a strong indicator that I can ask for 15-20% off tomorrow and get it. If that kind of salesperson offers you a "deal" unprompted, then that "deal" is actually their price for suckers. I hate that kind of thing, don't like being manipulated, and don't like it when scummy salespeople win. So I'll either look somewhere else or take that newfound knowledge and ask for something better than the "special", on my own timeline, not the salesperson's.
We eventually settled on a IKEA kitchen, just because they are fully transparent and offered what we needed, with no pressure or tricks. And I got the chance to build my own kitchen, which was a nice experience. If it was not for their limited choice of options they would be the only contender for our next kitchen.
I think that's good. They can't promise you any upcoming sale as they don't get to decide on that, but they know the sales generally come up on X day of the month/week.
It's like when you interview for a new job and ask you if you are interviewing with anyone else, why would you ever say no?
But yeah like moshmosh said, real estate is different. Anything where you are vying for exactly one of a thing is a different beast than whatever crap you SAAS vendor is trying to tell you.
Also, real estate is an exception because:
1 - there is actually scarcity. A building with 200 apartments only has 200 apartments.
2 - Some buildings are already (almost) full, so you can only get in when someone gets out.
But what I see here where I live are offers that are valid for a whole month or two. Of course, if all units are taken, then you can't get it, but if they have an unit available, the offer is good
This works particularly well for large one-time sales where pricing information is scarce and the relationship is less important. Example: sales for replacement windows, doors, roofs, etc.
I've also adopted the principle that if someone comes to me with an offer, it must be beneficial for them. This is especially true for door-to-door salesmen and utility contracts. Like they give you a big (like 50%) discount on electricity, but the gas price is where they get you.
Conversely, I've had a good experience with this. I was buying suits for the groomsmen in my wedding, and the salesman offered to hold everything until the following Thursday because there was a 15% off everything sale that day. He put them in a closet and I came in on that day so he could ring the sale and I'd get the discount.
Use this as an opportunity to inform people about the dangers of proprietary software.
https://worldofwork.io/2019/07/cialdinis-6-principles-of-per...
The other thing is while I think some of the only 2 left is probably intentionally misleading, some of it related to cached data. Airline inventory systems tend to be expensive to query, so it's tempting to show data from a cache if possible, but then there's freshness issues that you noted. Or there's just other people shopping too.
I bought an instrument the other day, online. When I first saw it, it said 3 people had it in their cart. Maybe they were saving up, maybe they were waiting on a tax refund, I don't know.
I feel kinda bad I took away their chance to play it instead of me. Anticipation destroyed. If it showed names & avatars, I'd probably feel even worse. Maybe it's different for truly mass-produced stuff, where the serial numbers are in the billions.
For those who don't know SMWS, they're basically an independent bottler under the guise of a club. Everything they bottle is cask strength, non-chill filtered and natural color, which is how I think all whisky should be.
You pay a yearly membership fee, which gives you access to regular tastings and other events, as well as access to buy bottles. Their sort of trademark thing is that they don't officially tell you which distilleries the bottles come from, so bottles are marked with a numerical code for the distillery and one for the specific cask. That means they can sometimes get casks from distilleries that are not too keen on having their name on independent bottlings, but the official reason given is that SMWS wants people to taste any given bottle free of preconceived ideas of what a whisky from any certain distillery "should" taste like. Of course, there are readily available lists mapping codes to distilleries all over the web, but the official pretense is kept up.
Coming back to the shopping cart, the 10 minute timer is there because they may only have 5 or 10 bottles of a given whisky, so adding it to your cart reserves one bottle for you, until you complete the order or the timer runs out. For limited-stock merchandise, I think that's a sensible way to ensure you don't get an annoying surprise right as you're trying to pay, and to ensure that people can't just reserve a bottle forever and never actually buy it.
Usually this works fine as only a small percentage of stock is floated in inventory, but if someone wants to take your store down, they can add many items to their cart that they never intend to buy and leave it indefinitely. If you don’t periodically empty unused carts it will create a problem. It’s possible that the site you visited kept a very small inventory and was suffering from these issues even without it being an attack.
A brand new ice cream place opened down the street and, since opening, lines have been out the door. 45 minute waits at minimum in the evenings.
But there they are on social media telling people "it's a great time to stop in!" The first two replies were people stating they'll wait a month until the lines die down. Probably not the reaction they're expecting and maybe a fatal one if word starts spreading.
Obviously, if you're selling a commodity product with readily available alternatives, your customers are simply going to order the alternative.
However, scarcity tactics work extraordinarily well for a subset of customers. Entire markets have been built around artificial scarcity. A valuable pokemon card or baseball card isn't valuable because it's hard to print colored squares on to card stock. It's valuable because someone in an office somewhere decided that only 1000 of those cards should be printed, and all of their customers decided that the 1000 card limit makes it valuable. The majority of the population rolls their eyes and moves on, but it doesn't matter because their core audience believes in the artificial scarcity.
It is not an artificial scarcity though. The seller can't print more rare cards, unless you were refering to Nintendo. I.e. if I am low on dollars there is no artificial scarcity of dollars just becouse the Fed can print more.
On common products though, the whole FOMO "Only X left in stock!" is just a big ignore for the sales tactic it is.
Yeah, I‘m sure I can trust you with my money, then.
It likely works, the additional sales makes up for that crowd who gets turned off. It even builds branding and desirability as angry as consumers get, look at Rolex, Patek Phillipe or Supreme.