Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#171

Post by dessant » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

techcode wrote: post #167

dessant wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about. > I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers. Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers an…

I hope you realize that picking out only bits and pieces that fit your predetermined view is basically just reinforcing your personal biases, and not bringing you to see the bigger picture. Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind. However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/w…

Some of your work was unethical and harmful, work that was later on found to be illegal in the European Union. All of this is part of the public record.

It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#172

Post by DarkUranium » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

alickz wrote: post #70

throwaway47292 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super…

>Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price. I've only heard this in rel…

This holds for all of EU, in fact.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#173

Post by DarkUranium » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

WilTimSon wrote: post #87

alickz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price. I've only heard this in rel…

What country is that, if you don't mind saying? I'd love to cite that example when friends who work in marketing start to babble about "cool tricks" they can do next time.

Anywhere in EU, for one. I can't find the exact info at the moment (Google gives me a bunch of completely irrelevant stuff), but it's definitely true.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#174

Post by techcode » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

dessant wrote: post #171

techcode wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you realize that picking out only bits and pieces that fit your predetermined view is basically just reinforcing your personal biases, and not bringing you to see the bigger picture. Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind. However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/w…

Some of your work was unethical and harmful, work that was later on found to be illegal in the European Union. All of this is part of the public record. It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.

AFAIK none of my own work, nor work of the people I was team lead off was unethical, harmful or illegal. Neither in EU or elsewhere.

Before jumping to further conclusions - I would encourage you to look at actual differences in website before and post that announcement you're referring to. Wayback archive should work - though some of this stuff might have not be shown, or shown differently to bots; otherwise over years there have been a bunch of articles covering persuasive techniques with examples/screenshots of Booking.com.

And then perhaps even ask specific questions based on those observations - and maybe, just maybe someone can answer them without actually breaking the law.

Though since it would be against the law for me to give too many technical and business details (employment contract, regulations related to publicly traded companies ...etc). Only way I can think off for you to get a peak into implementation - would be to become a colleague.

And finally - I will agree with you on that last sentence. It's never too late to reflect on things. That includes not acting surprised (or in denial) to hear that some "big company" you thought is doing bad things - is not.

Oh and definitely keep up with the good fight. Based on news with actual specific details of lawsuits and outcomes (some of which I initially only found about when they were used as examples in internal ethics workshops & trainings). There's a lot of companies out there that should be getting more scrutiny both internally and externally.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#175

Post by techcode » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

rsstack wrote: post #154

drclau wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a lawyer either. I was thinking that this may fall under false advertising [0]. That is, claiming N people are interested in the product/service while that information is clearly made up. To be clear, I’m referring to an implementation that just uses a number that looks good, disconnected from any sort of metrics. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

False advertising is narrower than some people would like it to be.

Indeed it's both not ethical not legal in most parts of the world.

My educated guess it that only reason it happens anywhere at all - is within "smaller" websites/companies which:

a) don't know better because they are mostly just tech people that didn't heave to deal with big company bureaucracy, they have no legal/ethics team - or (hopefully not big chunk) they do know it's not legal, but count on ...

b) they are small enough that no one bothers to deal with until amount of money company is making suddenly makes it go over whatever amount makes it worth the effort

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#176

Post by techcode » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

throwaway47292 wrote: post #88

azatris wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm, I think the fake number will bring more money, both short and long term. If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7) If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete. Sadly, unless it…

Traffic distribution is basically never uniform. Unless maybe if you've only got very very few products/pages (like just 1-5), though that definitely changes long before you reach 10_000 items.

And for the majority of mid to big websites - visitors/buyers will look only at minority of products/pages. Let's say it's like Pareto 80/20 percent principle. Though if not 90/10 - for tourism/travel/flights - because places like London, Paris [France, not dozens of them in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation)], Rome, Las Vegas, Ibiza ...etc are much, much more interesting/visited than say Anchorage/Alaska.

And unless you've got uniform spread of visitors/customers around the world - which I'm thinking that even Facebook/Google/Amazon don't really have (because Flipkart/WeChat/etc are used more in India/Chrina/etc). You're likely to see a daily (per hour), weekly (per work vs weekend days) pattern /where west is different than Israel and predominantly Muslim countries/ - the min/max difference even within one day/week is easily 2 to 5 times.

All of that is to say that by far majority of your revenue will likely be during workday afternoon in your target audiences time-zone, and from those 10_000 items it will probably be <=100 that are seen/bought by majority of your visitors.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#177

Post by techcode » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

throwaway47292 wrote: post #88

azatris wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm, I think the fake number will bring more money, both short and long term. If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7) If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete. Sadly, unless it…

Oh and it's illegal to lie in those ways (deceive potential customers) just about anywhere in the world.

And though there is legally gray area - majority of that tends to clearly be not ethical...

But you know - Elon "promised" self driving cars in just a month/quarter or so - how many years ago? IIRC he even said it would be good, no not good but best investment because such a car could earn you money on it's own ...

Yet neither we got those self-driving cars, nor Elon is in trouble due to those "forward looking statements" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#178

Post by alickz » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

WilTimSon wrote: post #87

alickz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price. I've only heard this in rel…

What country is that, if you don't mind saying? I'd love to cite that example when friends who work in marketing start to babble about "cool tricks" they can do next time.

Ireland. Also I was wrong with the 2 weeks, it's 28 days out of the last 3 months

https://thecai.ie/your-rights/your-rights/pricing/

>Businesses cannot claim that goods have been sold at a higher price and are now on sale for a lower price unless the goods were actually on sale at the higher price for a “reasonable period,” which is generally understood to be 28 days in the three months before the price reduction.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#179

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #69

virgilp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an opposing pov: we mostly use booking.com for our reservations, and have never had an issue with them, and found their support useful the one or two times we needed it. They're the best reservation site that I know (others are way worse), and are fairly customer friendly [+]. I still book directly whenever I can because I don't want the hosts to pay the rather large booking.com fees... but we often find places to…

I think the problem here is that while they may be easy for you to ignore, that’s not universally true.

Right. They presumably do A/B testing. They wouldn't use these manipulative practices if they didn't work.

Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)

#180

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

iamben wrote: post #73

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…

I'd be surprised if it were allowed in any jurisdiction.

It seems pretty universal that you aren't allowed to lie to people to make a sale.