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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

by wil421 7y ago

>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.

CamelCaseName 7y ago
>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.
jerf 7y ago
"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.
- nickjj 7y ago
  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.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    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.
coob 7y ago
I spoke to someone actually at Hotels.com about this urgency messaging. The number isn't fake.
- wil421 7y ago
  Good to know. It was never hilariously high like 43. It would say 5-10 or so.

by wil421 7y ago

CamelCaseName 7y ago

>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.

jerf 7y ago

"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.

nickjj 7y ago
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.
- bluGill 7y ago
  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.

coob 7y ago

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

wil421 7y ago
Good to know. It was never hilariously high like 43. It would say 5-10 or so.