Urgency and Scarcity in Ecommerce – The Good Old Pals That Never Let You Down

We’re sure you already know the various urgency and scarcity tactics you can use in ecommerce, but are you using them to the fullest extent? While protecting you profits? Just asking 🙂

Old but gold and backed up with tons of research

People tend to place higher value on an object that is scarce and a lower value on one that is available in abundance. No wonder, marketing guru Robert Cialdini cites ‘Scarcity’ as one of the six golden persuasion principles in his book “Influence” (which by the way we adore). When combined with Urgency, which is essentially the other side of the same coin, the two make for a potent weapon for increasing eCommerce sales.

So if you have a decent amount of repetitive business or have a good conversion for the new users. We suggest you wipe out the dust from these good old tactics and give them another go. Combine those two with seamless and express checkout – you can see a lot of magic happening.

Some of our favourite urgency and scarcity tactics to use:

1. Stock Scarcity
2. Size Scarcity
3. Time Scarcity & urgency
4. Limited-Time Discount on Abandoned Cart Items
5. Shopping Cart Item Sold Out
6. Limited-Time Free Delivery
7. Special Discount Hours

Feel free to read about the tactics from VWO’s blog or Core DNA’s blog 🙂

Brought to you by

• Lauri – UX/UI design
• Oskar – UI Animation
• Team UXD – Brainstorming