“Complete your order! Only 3 more left in stock.” “50% off only till 5 pm today.”
It’s the third episode of ‘exposing the simple nosy strategies that keep you glued to your phone.’ We will be looking at a strategy called ‘scarcity’.
Scarcity is one of the most popular strategies used by e-commerce companies, such as Amazon, Wish.com, and AliExpress, to boost interaction and attention to specific goods and services that need to be sold on their apps. The effectiveness of this strategy is based on the premise that the less available something is, the more value it is perceived to have. Therefore, e-commerce companies artificially create scarcity to increase the perceived value of their goods and keep you on their apps either window-shopping or spending money unnecessary. I’ll classify this artificial scarcity into four types: Scarcity of time, Scarcity of quantity, Scarcity of Information, and Scarcity of inclusion.
Scarcity of Time: Sometimes, e-commence apps may set a time limit for purchasing a specific product or service. It may look like this, “You have 3 mins left to check out or lose this coupon”. Sometimes, the user may not need the item being purchased but due to the artificial sense of urgency attached to the sale, the user may end up staying on the app to purchase the item that they may end up regretting.
Scarcity of Quantity: They may also use the ‘X left in stock’ tactic to trick the app user’s mind that the value and popularity of the commodity being sold is so high and is about to run out. You stay on the app and try to beat the ‘imaginary’ people that may be trying to purchase the ‘X left in stock’.
Scarcity of Information: Humans usually want to be the first to know about any new information such as deals, offers or promotions. These e-commerce apps always try to offer you this ‘scarce’ information, in exchange for a piece of your personal information such as your email address, date of birth and some other demographic data. They typically do this when they innocently ask you to sign up on their apps or website. Then they inundated you with notifications of offers that fit your demographic profile, hence prompting you to open their apps more frequently.
Scarcity of Inclusion: They can also make social inclusion appear scarce, just to keep you interested in the services offered on their apps. For example, a gym’s app may offer an online training program but offer only ‘limited’ seats to create an artificial sense of value and importance of the program. This is one of the reasons why some people register for gym classes, but fail to attend, because they only registered to get that sense of inclusion.
People tend to want what they cannot have. It’s just simple psychology. This makes Scarcity a very powerful tool in e-commerce apps. My rule of thumb against this strategy: “If you did not need something before opening an e-commerce app, do not purchase it.”
I’ll see you all next month for another episode!
Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash
