Artificial scarcity doesn’t just apply to digital products.

It’s been around for quite some time and even has its own Wikipedia entry (no big surprise there I suppose).

You can see it used everywhere when you start looking – limited edition whatevers (crisp/chip flavours, even Marmite), price reductions, the perception of scarcity with things like diamonds, the list goes on.

Is artificial scarcity good, bad or just something we’re becoming immune to?

My personal view is that we’re getting more and more used to the idea of false scarcity but that doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t fall for it.

We’re used to price reductions in shops being for a limited time only. Quite a few of us are savvy to the artificial price reductions where the “previous” price has been bumped up for the requisite number of days to satisfy the legal side of things and is then “reduced” back down to the original price. Often with a multi-buy so that more of the product is sold.

That’s standard practice for almost any retailer.

“Limited” stock is another ploy.

Amazon will regularly tell you that there are only a handful of the item you’re looking at in stock. This is designed to get you to visualise the item being on a shelf in a store where you’d see that there weren’t many left and would therefore buy now rather than run the risk of it being out of stock the next time you visited.

But with near enough auto-replenishment and often not many sales per day of any given item that’s almost certainly an example of artificial scarcity.

At least with Amazon the number seems to drop if an item is sold so their figures are (probably) correct.

With some of the digital products I’ve seen recently that’s definitely not the case.

There’s curently a big launch and the page has been stuck on 37 sold out of 50 available for most of the launch.

Which in my mind says “liar”.

If you’re not sure whether that’s happening on a product you’re thinking of buying and you don’t 100% care about “missing out” then leave it overnight and press refresh in your browser.

If the figure is the same in the morning then either the product is nowhere near as “must have” as you thought it was or the vendor is using underhand tactics to create artificial scarcity.

Neither of which are a good sign.

After all, if no-one else is buying the product then the social proof that the vendor was trying to convey isn’t happening.

And if the vendor isn’t telling the truth about the number left, what else are they being deceptive about?

The problem is these triggers still work a lot of the time

Yes, we’re becoming more cynical – it’s a running joke here in the UK that hell will freeze over before the sale at the furniture store DFS ends – but we still buy.

Because artificial scarcity still works.

At the back of our mind there’s the question of “what if…”

We know that 9 times out of ten or – more likely – 99 times out of a hundred or maybe even more the scarcity is false.

But what if this time it’s real?

What if the limited edition of Disney’s Fantasia in 1990 really was the last time it was available (as was implied in the advertising at the time) and we’ve lost our chance to own a copy forever?

Well, the simple answer is we’d miss out on that product.

Our life wouldn’t end.

In fact, by tomorrow or the day after we’d probably have forgotten all about it.

And the forgotten about it part is the really big reason that artificial scarcity is used in the first place.

We’re so busy and we’ve got so much to think about that – at least for smaller purchases – if we don’t buy it today, we probably never will.

Something else irresistible will have taken its place.

Does that mean you should use artificial scarcity?

If it doesn’t clash with your ethics too much, I’d say probably “yes”.

It’s a case of if you can’t beat them, join them.

And if the product you’re selling really would benefit people then maybe there’s an obligation on your part to tip them over the edge and get them to buy.

That’s a whole different discussion involving sales ethics.

Personally, I use artificial scarcity occasionally.

I use dime sales for pricing – the price rises every X sales or every Y hours.

The scarcity there is that if you don’t buy soon the price might be higher.

And since it’s implemented by a third party site (Warrior Plus) it’s real.

Except the countdown timer they provide doesn’t stop working once the maximum price has been reached, so you see something counting down to the next price but in reality there isn’t a next price rise, the price you see is the maximum price I’m likely to charge for the forseeable future.

Which is a grey area – it’s not correct but in my experience it does still encourage sales and unless I’ve made a diary note to remove the code there’s a good chance it will stay there for a long time.

Awkward – but you could always come back the following day, press refresh and see whether or not the price had moved.

And probably still more ethical than increasing the price of an item for 30 days before dropping it for a promotion. Something every single UK supermarket does on countless products, year in, year out.

There’s no easy answer.

As a buyer, you need to be constantly on your guard so that you’re not conned into making a purchase that you don’t want to make.

As a vendor, you need to decide which line you want to cross – if any.

And whether or not that will impact on sales.

And whether or not you’re personally comfortable with that decision.

It’s a dilemma.

I’m personally really mixed on it – I’m comfortable with real price scarcity, a bit less comfortable with the “next price rise of $0.00 in X hours” (but it works), and I don’t use the fake “only Y permanently left” option as that’s a complete lie rather than a white lie.

I avoid vendors who use the completely fake option – I don’t knowingly buy from them, I don’t knowingly promote them.

And I treat near enough every scarcity offer as if it’s not really scarce.

Which means that ultimately I’m being trained by other marketers to ignore scarcity almost completely.

Your thoughts are welcome in the comments box below.

Hurry, hurry, hurry before the internet runs out of electrons!