71–80 of 183 posts
I implemented this functionality for a certain SaaS with many large customers. I made sure to have a scalable way to measure unique viewers across different time frames. Only after we launched it, we realized all our competitors just put a random number that looked nice.
How did that turn out in the end? I presume having a real number is long-term optimal in terms of keeping customers compared to showing a fake number.
The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? I book hotels a few hours in advance and stats like "only 2 rooms left", are usually correct when I check with hotel reception. At least in Europe booking.com is much better than competition. It has loyalty discounts, transparent pricing and consistent experience. Reviews and descriptions are actually useful, not BS. Emails I get are usually "place you looked at become 30% cheaper".
It was just an illegal consumer practice.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion."
It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might, for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this example, it refreshed every time you reloaded the page. If you went back to the product it was a different number. If you HAVE to do this, at least use a cookie or something. The changing number makes the product, and by extension the whole site, look completely suspicious. One of the absolute number one things I want to do on a landing page/PDP is build trust. This falls at the first hurdle.
This wasn't implemented in the UK, but with a little Googling I ended up under the impression it would break trading laws over here.
I guess the shop's competitors could sue them for unfair practices in many countries?
Probably in China, will just vanish overnight and launch under the name $(RANDOM_ONLINE_STORE_NAME)
Although I find it suspicious how all their products have full 5 star reviews.
The data was stored in a really inefficient way and so the operation took a stupidly long time. I decided to add a progress bar so that people don't think the app is busted (which they occasionally did). Turned out, much of the time spent was on the server's end, so I couldn't track the majority of the "progress".
I had already put effort into the bar, so I replaced the "real" progress tracking with a script that randomly incremented the progress. I tweaked some heuristics until it roughly matched the amount of time the server tended to take but was random enough to not be super obvious.
After the progress bar launched, someone from the warehouse actually walked up and thanked me for the progress bar.
Of course, that's all fun and games. Weird psychological manipulation in e-commerce is horrible.
When clicking on the 'comments' icon in the article, a sidebar open with the heading Responses (36). I'd not noticed I'd gone offline. After some time, the sidebar updated with There are currently no responses for this story. Be the first to respond. which is incorrect, as there should be 36 responses with the heading still there.
So not only don't have fraudulent counters as mentioned in the article, also provide responses that correctly reflect a state, error, etc, handling the response correctly rather than falling back on an inappropriate default.
This is very close to home (sadly). Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion." It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might , for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this…
The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work.
In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
This is very close to home (sadly). Someone I worked with recently put the "X of these sold in the last 24 hours" across a load of product pages as an example of "things we should be doing to increase conversion." It didn't increase conversion because the target market was all wrong (I suspect it might , for a single click from FB/native ad to a single landing page for an 'on a whim' product). More so, much like this…
Was X some randomly generated number, not based on any actual inventory?