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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

(EDIT: I understood the messages to be misleading, reply says they are true)

This walks a line between helping the customer to make decisions manipulation (I'm being generous here). If I saw an online store doing this I would think less of them (again, being generous in my language) and go somewhere else. Also I can tell the difference between real scarcity (like an eBay auction timer out) and simulated scarcity...

... is what I like to think happens. Obviously it works and the chances of me, or anyone else who thinks the same way, being exceptional is probably slim.

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We are not simulating scarcity, we are integrated with the shop's backend and show real stock. If a shop owner wants to lie about his stock that's his responsibility, but hey, he also can do that without our tool.

The tool only enforces certain usps or charateristics of the shop at the right time.

Good to know. I assumed they were lies: there's a lot of scumbaggery in sales, so it's perhaps a natural assumption.

No problem. Also, the shop wouldn't gain anything in the long run if they were telling lies. We measure conversion over multiple sales and that shop would see poorer performance for that message compared to our control group.

Some website are playing blurry lines games so much. They do use time / stock limited "flash sales" to trigger buying. Then relaunch a new flash sale a few minutes after. Most of the time you won't notice it, you're either busy looking at other stuff or just went off the web because you spent enough money. I even thought it was a page refresh bug until I understood the pattern.

Here is another one you can add that I have found works with sales that I make (although those are big ticket sales).

Attach some proof of what others payed in higher prices. As in "10 people paid $x for this last week".

Thanks! Will try that with one or two of our customers, shall I let you know our findings?

Definitely - startupdomainadvice@gmail.com

Pricing strategies are one of my specialties and I use them in negotiation almost every day.

It'd be interesting to know how Booking.com, a good example of these tactics, uses "scarcity" messages, as every time I try to book something on that website I always get messages like "only 2 left" and "5 people looking at this right now".

I think Booking.com was actually a client of Persuasion API; a competitor of Conversify (coincidentally all three Dutch companies.)

I think they actually ran this experiment only through their mailing list though but either way Booking.com was already using all these conversion tactics before though so at best they actually used this to occasionally turn off some of the less effective social proofs.

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