Etsy is using fake countdown timers to get you to buy stuff

It’s November, the month of discounted holiday shopping. If you’ve shopped on Etsy recently, you’ve probably noticed a lot of sales. And a lot of green countdown timers ticking down the seconds until a deal is gone forever.

Except in a lot of cases, it’s not.

In our holiday shopping we accidentally bumped into a seller on Etsy using a fake countdown timer on a deal that didn’t actually expire. Curious to know if it was a one-off thing, we ended up tracking 20 bestselling or Etsy-curated products with countdown sales. Of the 20, 16 (80%) simply reset when they hit 0, with no change in price. The other 4 actually dropped the price further when time was up.

We saw misleading countdown timers across 10 different product categories from 20 different vendors. We saw fake timers reset on a knife set, cufflinks, a personalized sweatshirt, a personalized throw pillow, a personalized cuff bracelet, a baby cardigan, baby toys, dog collars, wall art, lighting fixtures, a cutting board, PJs, a Christmas wreath, and a wedding keepsake box with no change in price. The prices actually dropped further on a soy candle, a personalized keychain, a gold birth year necklace and a Christmas tree topper.

Etsy gives sellers a number of tools to boost sales, including offering time-limited sales. Etsy automatically generates the countdown timer for sales that are expiring in less than 24 hours. Sellers can create layered sales so that when one sale expires, a “new” sale – and countdown timer – starts up right away. Judging by our survey, it appears the practice is not uncommon.

Pressure tactics make you feel rushed

Countdown timers pressure you to act fast. Watching the seconds tick away until a deal is gone forever gives you a real visceral sense of time running out. It can be a little anxiety-inducing and make it that much harder to think.

Online stores have other tactics to nudge you towards less-well-thought-out purchases. A common trick is the “scarcity appeal”. Instead of a time constraint like a limited time sale, these are all about how stock is running low or an item’s in high demand, so you better hurry up before it’s too late. Maybe a website will inform you that there’s only 5 of an item left, that a lot of other people have it in their carts, or that it’s selling really fast.

A sample of Etsy’s scarcity messagesPhoto by TPIN Staff | TPIN

Online shopping has given retailers a broader array of tricks. In a brick and mortar store, for example, it’s easy for you to see for yourself how much stock there is. But when shopping online, digital storefronts like Etsy can choose how to communicate scarcity. The problem is that as an online shopper, there’s no way for you to guarantee that that scarcity is real. Numbers can be presented out of context making things seem much more urgent than they are. Maybe 20 people have that personalized candle in their carts, but only an average of one person a week is actually buying it and the store has 100 in stock.

Our advice? Don’t sweat the digital pressure tactics. Their aim is to excite you into making an impulse purchase, discouraging you from taking the time to comparison shop, do more research, or ask yourself “do I really need this?”

There are plenty of ways to make the holidays bright without falling for tricks to push you towards worse purchases.

Thanks to Rachel Brenner-Goldstein for her contributions to this piece.