Have you ever encountered sites where the urgency of the sale made you smell a rat?
Consider these examples:
1) Faking Limited Availability
I've seen websites with count-down tickers that are real, as well as fake.
It's simple to spot the fakers. You just wait for the ticker to reach zero, then refresh the website and it starts counting down from the original number again. (cant remember the site though, it was years ago)
2) Faking a promotional deadline
I've seen honest sellers who actually keep to the promoted deadlines, and dishonest sellers that use php scripts to always set the deadline x-amount of days into the future (this one was a ClickBank Affiliate Vendor site)
I hopped onto that site a few days later, ready to pay the premium for missing out on the 2-day deadline. Lo and behold, the promotion was still set to expire in 2 days.
Integrity means everything to consumers. At that point I simply refused to buy their product.
3) Promotional deadlines becoming an arbitrary choice of the seller
Seriously... Don't let me watch through a sales video, then near the end tell me that you reserve the right to take the deal down at any time, but you don't know when. This is just embarrassing.
When a promo-deadline becomes an arbitrary choice, it means you can just put the deal back on anytime when you need to make money and sales again. This is just as good as faking a promotional deadline.
The bottom line is that it's not really a deadline when it's an arbitrary choice, because if you do take it down, eventually you will put it up again and my mailbox will alert me that the deal is on again - because I'm on your mailing list dummy! And consumers are not stupid - We know when you're talking BS, even if you are the biggest hotshot sales guy on the planet.
I was so close to buying a product from a particular website, and - BAM !! - I lost all respect for the seller when he said "I don't know when, but at some point I'll close this deal down to buyers... blah blah".
To me that just eliminated any sense of urgency, because I knew he'd have to put it back on again (if he really ever took it down to begin with...).
How do I know? Because he's a salesman for goodness sakes! He has to put food on the table every day of the week, and he has to pay insurance for his flashy sportscar and all the other wonderful things he enjoys as an entrepreneur. He can't afford to completely take the deal down forever. Its just plain impossible.
Needless to say I later bought a similar product, at a much lower price, and in the opinion of many people, equally as good (if not better).
Have your say and comment/respond to this thread. Let's improve our work ethic and raise a standard in writing good copy.
