When searching for something on Amazon I sometimes see a message in red on the right-hand box that says something like “Only 2 left in stock - order soon”. While it’s possible Amazon knows how much of a particular item truly is left in stock, it would be extremely easy for them to fake this in order to motivate buyers.
Does anyone know for a fact if these messages are legitimate, or just a clever way to motivate people to buy versus wait? Please don’t say that Amazon has no reason to fake these messages since getting people to actually buy things is what Amazon is all about.
This article alludes to it but doesn’t offer a definitive answer:
As a former e-commerce guy, however, it wouldn’t be hard for an actual seller (who uses the Amazon platform) to manipulate quantities in order to create a ‘call to action’ even if Amazon doesn’t sanction the practice.
Until/unless Amazon does prohibit it, and the vendor gets caught.
But I’m not sure if this actually happens on Amazon. I tend to agree with the article’s basic premise: that it can be counter-productive in some cases. Not that unscrupulous sellers still won’t try …
A close friend is a FBA merchant (*) on Amazon Canada. He monitors inventory on his items constantly.
Amazon doesn’t lie about the inventory, as far as he can tell, but the numbers are somewhat fluid because new items are constantly being unboxed at the receiving docks, shifted between fulfillment centers, etc. The number shown is typically the items really available for sale to you at that exact moment, but it can change in a few minutes. Sometimes Amazon will allow a customer to purchase an item that hasn’t yet arrived at the fulfillment center if it’s from a trusted supplier or FBA merchant.
FBA means "“Fulfillment by Amazon” : his items are sent to Amazon warehouses (fulfillment centers), sold by his company through the Amazon website, and delivered by Amazon.
It’s about as accurate as possible. FBA is a huge amount of Amazon’s business, and while everything moves fast once it’s inside the Amazon network it’s not always that swift coming from the vendors once stock is low. There is some fluctuation with products moving around, getting lost, falling on floors and getting run over by robots, etc, but not that much. Amazon tracks and measures everything they can as accurately as possible. The inventory system is chaotic by design but very data driven.
There was an interview with an e-commerce specialist the other day who described the widespread use of what he called “dark patterns” by many e-commerce websites intended to trick or mislead or at least to accelerate a potential sale, and the “only x left in stock” gambit was one of them. Not saying Amazon necessarily does this, but they certainly do other things, like aggressively marketing Amazon Prime and failing to make clear that the “free trial” will roll into a paid subscription. My own limited experience with Amazon is consistent with what others have said – that the number of items claimed to be left in stock does reflect some kind of reality, but as mentioned that number can change very quickly, or if they run out the same item might pop up as being fulfilled by a different vendor.
I was watching a particular down jacket at one online retailer, and when the one in my size was down to “only 1 remaining” I just went ahead and bought it. Shortly thereafter all sizes were gone and the product showed as unavailable. A week or so later they were all back in stock. Presumably they used up their in-house inventory and then ordered more from their wholesaler. Perfectly cromulent I suppose, but still a little sneaky.
What exactly is sneaky about it? When I order something on Amazon I expect it to arrive within a few days; if it will take a week or more to even get it in stock before shipping it, I want to know that before I put in the order.
You have no way of knowing if they’re going to get more. So it could be “buy now or you’ll never have a chance again” or “buy now or you’ll have to wait a week or two.”
On this, there’s the silly “Customers who bought this item also bought:” list below each item. Sure, everybody who bought a pair of 10-pound dumbbells also bought one of these slightly different pairs of 10-pound dumbbells. And everybody who bought this lawn mower also bought one of these other lawn mowers. They should at least formulate it as “also looked at”, then it wouldn’t be a lie.
I guess? It never would have occurred to me to read it that way, ie “will never be in stock again”. I’ve always assumed it means “we have just 2 in stock; buy now or wait an unknown amount of time before this is available again” so it never seemed sneaky to me.
Pretend I’m looking at a toaster. Below the listing of the toaster, I would see several other toasters listed, with an indication of what percentage bought the one I was looking at versus the others. So if 60% of the people chose another one, I may want to look at that one instead.
That depends a lot on the nature of the item and whether the vendor is obviously some small trader in mainland China versus some name brand US product sold by Amazon itself.
I buy a lot more of the former than the latter from Amazon. So I usually interpret at least Amazon’s low stock warnings as meaning “this item from this vendor will disappear forever soon”. Whether that entices me to buy extra quantity now or go find a different similar item from a different vendor depends on the item.
All pre-COVID of course. That has thrown a large wrinkle in the availability of otherwise unremarkable products like TP, Lysol brand spray disinfectant, or even my favorite brand & size of contact lens rinse.
Thank you for that. It looks like an interesting paper, though it wasn’t one of those guys. It was a CBC radio interview, and I dug into it a bit more, and found that the guy I’m thinking of was Anteneh Ayanso, a professor of information systems and founding director of the Centre for Business Analytics at Brock University. Anyone interested can listen to the interview at the “Spark” podcast link near the beginning of the article, starting at the 12:00 mark. Prior to that is some other crap.
Personal anecdote only, but I do a lot of orders of equipment from Amazon for my workplace (I’m an IT guy) and I think it’s legit. If they say there are 2 of an item left, I can’t buy 3, or if I do the ETA goes from “next day” to “4 weeks from now” or whatever. If I buy them out, it will soon after say it’s out of stock, and it might be weeks before it shows up again as available (much as @jjakucyk experienced).
If this is a scam it’s a really poor one. If they have 30 copies of an item in stock and tell me that there are only 2 left, and I want to buy 10, why would they refuse to sell those other 8 to me? They lose money that way.
Once upon a time I used to be a retail salesman (both commissioned, and as an assistant store manager). I’m acquainted with tricks to get people to buy stuff. Faking a shortage isn’t something a retailer would do. Now, if you’re buying a car or a house and the salesman insists that there is another buyer coming to snatch it up so you had better buy now, that’s a common sales tactic. Or if they claim that the item is “limited edition” or only available for a “limited time”, that’s also common. Those are pretty standard high pressure sales tactics. Telling someone that you only have a small number of items in stock will never drive up interest in the item; it has the opposite effect. It is telling someone who wants to buy in volume that they need to go elsewhere. And trust me, as someone who did sales you really love the volume buyers. You bend over backwards for those people.
I have also worked as a retailer for a place where they only sell items in limited quantities, and there are only two times you do that… One is when you really do have a limited supply and don’t want to tick people off (such as letting a guy buy out all the toilet paper in the store to anger every other customer who needs to wipe their butt) or if the item you’re selling is a loss leader. For a real life example, my store I was a manager at was a computer store and we sold printers at a loss. We did that because if someone wanted a computer with a printer, we had better have a printer to offer or that person will go elsewhere. The money we made on the computer more than made up for what we lost on the printer. But if someone wanted to buy more than one printer, we didn’t allow that.
I’m no longer answering the question here so hope I’m not in breach of GQ rules (looks like it’s been answered to a reasonable degree) but I would highly recommend a browser add on like Keepa, Camelizer or Amazon Assistant when shopping on Amazon. They will insert themselves onto the webpage to display a graph of prices over time, and they allow you to set an email alert when the price drops, among other things like displaying more product details than often given on the page.
They can’t fix those misleading customer reviews though.
