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How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

nytimes.com

11–20 of 113 posts

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#11
post #7

Here's ThredUP's Julia Boyle posting a number of open engineering positions in a recent "Who is hiring?" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358221

The link is 7 months old. I am geniunely curious how this is relevant to the discussion. Can you clarify please?

Thredup is the first company mentioned in the article.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#13
post #6

An age old tactic I have encountered: Deep discounts (after raising the prices of course). For e.g. (Harvard research paper - WIP) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-113_16977... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/how-ret... https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/09/24/what...

I don’t understand the issue with this sales tactic. There is complete price transparency, and it takes minimal mental capacity to understand that “discounts” are just to fulfill people’s desire to “get” something that others might not be able to. If they want that dopamine hit, then let them have it.

If something is worth X at time Y at place Z to the buyer, then it doesn’t matter what the discount is or isn’t.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#14
post #6

An age old tactic I have encountered: Deep discounts (after raising the prices of course). For e.g. (Harvard research paper - WIP) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-113_16977... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/how-ret... https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/09/24/what...

I don’t understand the issue with this sales tactic. There is complete price transparency, and it takes minimal mental capacity to understand that “discounts” are just to fulfill people’s desire to “get” something that others might not be able to. If they want that dopamine hit, then let them have it. If something is worth X at time Y at place Z to the buyer, then it doesn’t matter what the discount is or isn’t.

Assume that the price of an item is $100 today ($200 original price - so a 50% discount). A week from now is Black Friday. The retailer has said 70% off on all goods. Now if the retailer increases the price to $333.33 (100/(1-0.7)) and then discounts it by 70% to give a final selling price of $100, wouldn't you feel cheated? I know I would.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#15
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link is 7 months old. I am geniunely curious how this is relevant to the discussion. Can you clarify please?

Thredup is the first company mentioned in the article.

My bad! Apologies for not catching this earlier.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#16
post #6

An age old tactic I have encountered: Deep discounts (after raising the prices of course). For e.g. (Harvard research paper - WIP) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-113_16977... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/how-ret... https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/09/24/what...

I don’t understand the issue with this sales tactic. There is complete price transparency, and it takes minimal mental capacity to understand that “discounts” are just to fulfill people’s desire to “get” something that others might not be able to. If they want that dopamine hit, then let them have it. If something is worth X at time Y at place Z to the buyer, then it doesn’t matter what the discount is or isn’t.

Clearly it does matter in practice, otherwise discounts wouldn't be worth advertising?

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#17

Here's ThredUP's Julia Boyle posting a number of open engineering positions in a recent "Who is hiring?" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358221

Wow thredup has a dress discounted from $60 available for only $7.39 if I sign up now! I better hurry as there’s only 3 left and Sarah from New Jersey just got one!

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#18
> About 30 sites made it easy to sign up for services but particularly hard to cancel, requiring phone calls or other procedures. The Times requires people to talk with a representative online or by phone to cancel subscriptions, but the researchers did not study it or other publishing sites.

Nice that the editor was at least allowed to point out that their own employer employs many of these "dark patterns".

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#19

> About 30 sites made it easy to sign up for services but particularly hard to cancel, requiring phone calls or other procedures. The Times requires people to talk with a representative online or by phone to cancel subscriptions, but the researchers did not study it or other publishing sites. Nice that the editor was at least allowed to point out that their own employer employs many of these "dark patterns".

Also, I'd actually been considering a Times subscription for a while. That's going to be a hell no from me now.

Re: How e-commerce sites manipulate people into buying things

#20

NYTimes + incognito = rejection.

Disable javascript on their site. The next question would be "why is the browser advertising that it's in incognito mode?", but that's not a question for the NYT.

This "feature" is being removed:

https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/1138471166115368960

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