Do You REALLY Want Product Creators To Tell The Truth About Scarcity?

See? Not everyone reads every word.

I think, though, that there is a difference between scarcity and a deadline. Scarcity is (or should be) real whereas a deadline is typically artificial.

Scarcity is used to increase the value of a sale, while deadlines are used to increase sales.

As a buyer, scarcity is important because it means I get something that only a limited people will also have. So, if you tell me you are only selling 50 units, I want to know that you stopped selling at 50 units, not 51 and certainly not 100. That is because part of the value of the product is its scarcity.

On the other hand, a deadline does not give the product additional value, in most cases. The only value to me, as a buyer, is the money I saved by buying at the sale price. Scarcity is not involved here because the product will continue to be available at the higher price.

As a buyer, I am harmed if you sell 55 copies of a product you told me you were limiting to 50 copies. But, I am not harmed if you sell additional copies of a product at the sale price after the sale has ended.

By that same token, as a potential buyer, I would be more likely to ask you to extend a sales price to me after a sale that I missed, rather than ask you to sell me the 51st copy of a product you said you would limit to 50 copies. With the former, you get an opportunity to make an additional sale that you might not otherwise make and, since the point of a sale is to increase sales, why not ask? (Another reason is that unadvertised deals get made all the time.)

I mentioned that, in most cases, a deadline does not give the product added value. The exceptions are deadlines that are combined with scarcity. That is, if you say that, after a certain date, you will discontinue the product and never sell it again, then that's adding scarcity. It may not be in a predefined number of units, but it is scarcity because, after the deadline, the product will not be sold at any price. In such a case, if you were to sell to other buyers after the deadline, you are harming buyers who purchased before the deadline. So, in that case, the deadline must be firm.

Otherwise, when you're just dealing with deadlines on sales, being artificially set to begin with, I think there is room for flexibility because it is not a scarcity issue. I don't think you want to extend a sale into perpetuity, because there you risk a credibility issue. "Oh, it's always on sale!" But, to extend a deadline a bit for a few stragglers, I don't think there's a big issue there.

But, by the same token, sales don't have to be flexible at all. If you miss out, you miss out. Sellers aren't under any kind of obligation to offer a sale price, so they can be as flexible or as firm as they like.