5 tricks marketers and retailers use to get you to buy more

It’s no secret that retailers and advertisers want you to buy more. More than you need, more than you intended, and maybe even more than you can feel good about later.

There’s a long tradition of retailer tricks. Putting milk in the back of the store so you walk by less essential snacks to get there.  “Going out of business” sales that last 3 years. Stocking shelves so expensive products sit at your eye level, and the ones kids might want down at theirs.

As more of our shopping has moved online, retailers and advertisers have given some old maneuvers new twists. If you’re shopping this Black Friday or Cyber Monday – or any other time of the year – odds are you’ll see at least one of these. Being able to spot these tricks may make you more likely to chuckle when you see them, instead of falling for them.

Here’s 5 common psychological tricks to know.

#1 – Urgency appeals

Urgency appeals use artificial time limits to pressure you to act fast. Think Black Friday, Prime Day and every other sale ending soon. Hurry before it’s over – last chance! Don’t miss out!

Retailers have long used limited time offers to prompt a sense of urgency in shoppers, but online storefronts have a new trick: the countdown timer. Watching the seconds tick away until a deal is gone forever gives you a real visceral sense of time running out and, at least for this shopper, can prove a tiny bit anxiety-inducing. It makes it that much harder to think clearly. 

But it turns out sometimes these countdowns aren’t counting down to anything at all. 

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 across 10 different product categories. Of the 20 we tracked, 16 (80%) simply reset when they hit 0, with no change in price. The other 4 actually got cheaper when time ran out. 

So don’t let a countdown timer stress you out. Remember that it’s trying to nudge you towards instant, less-well-thought-out buying.

#2 – Scarcity appeals

Like urgency appeals, the goal of scarcity appeals is to pressure you to act fast. But instead of a time constraint, it’s how much stock is left – something is running low or it’s in high demand, so you better hurry up before it’s too late. This tactic aims 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?”

In a brick and mortar store it’s easier for you to see for yourself how much stock there is. But when shopping online, digital storefronts can choose how to communicate scarcity. Maybe they’ll inform you that there’s only 5 of an item left, that a lot of other people have it in their carts, or that an item is selling really fast.

We found it on Etsy, Amazon, Temu and Uncommon Goods.Photo by TPIN Staff | TPIN

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 coffee maker in their carts, but only an average of one person a week is actually buying it and the store has 100 in stock.

When you see this tactic, don’t let yourself get freaked out. Odds are fair that you’re not really missing out.

#3 – Tricks with pricing

There’s a whole field called psychological pricing dedicated to figuring out how to tell you how much something costs as painlessly as possible.

Retailers have a lot of tactics. You’re probably familiar with the most common ones, like rounding down – something seems cheaper if it’s $4.99 instead of $5. Others include removing commas from large amounts ($1200 instead of $1,200) and giving discounts on items we’re likely to feel guilty about buying. I don’t need a cookie, but if it’s half off when I buy my coffee, the discount gives me at least some justification. 

Amongst the skeeziest tactics out there are fake markdowns on MSRPs retailers never intend to charge. It turns out that trick is pretty common. Last year, Consumer Checkbook surveyed sales run by 24 major retailers and found that “most stores’ sale prices—even those that advertise big savings—are bogus discounts, with retailers offering the same ‘sale price’ more than half the time.” 

But perhaps the most common price trick you’ll see this shopping season is showing you the price broken out into monthly installments. And it is, in fact, a bit of a trick. 

Monthly payments can lead you to spending more

There’s no doubt that monthly payments can be useful for spreading out costs that would be financially challenging to undertake all at once, like buying a car. But it’s also true that monthly installments play with our perception of cost. If you can walk away with an item today for 25% of the price, it feels like you’ve gotten a deal when in the end you really haven’t. You’re still going to have to pay the full cost – and sometimes even more in late fees, if you’re not careful. 

With Buy Now Pay Later options embedded in checkouts across the internet, you can pay for almost anything in 4 easy payments. These days online stores often do the mental math for you, displaying the monthly price as a more friendly alternative right alongside the total.

The result can be more spending. One survey of BNPL users found that two-thirds reported buying more than they otherwise would have if they had to pay the total upfront. The result can also be more impulsive spending too, something the BNPL companies are well aware of. A 2017 report co-authored by the BNPL firm Klarna noted that spontaneous purchases, “often resulting from lapses of self-control, inner strength or resolve” can be “lucrative for retailers.” The report – called “Emotional eCommerce” – offers ways online shops can help shoppers overcome hesitations on their impulse purchases. Naturally, integrating BNPL is one of the report’s suggested solutions.

It’s estimated that Americans will finance a record-high $18.5 billion of their holiday shopping with BNPL. Nearly half of parents this year intend to use BNPL to minimize the guilt of larger splurge purchases. 

But it isn’t just BNPL pushing monthly payments. Wayfair, for example, displays its own credit card offers with suggested monthly payments next to the price. Apple displays the cost if you finance through its new Apple Card Monthly Installments plan. You can break up your purchase be it $1,000 for the new iPhone 16 Pro ($41.62/month for 2 years) or $50 for a case ($4.08/month for 1 year). 

Monthly payments can be helpful, but be careful not to let them become your justification for overspending. There are ways to make the holidays bright without taking on debt you can avoid. 

Different ways of displaying monthly payments. Clockwise from left: Apple, Uncommon Goods, Wayfair, Adidas and Temu.Photo by TPIN Staff | TPIN

#4 – Social proof

Social proof is a phenomenon where people like to make decisions based on what others are doing. If your neighbor is loving his electric leaf blower and tells you all about it, maybe you’re more likely to buy one yourself. He’s not getting paid to tell you he loves it.

Customer testimonials and influencers

Marketers try to manufacture this magic using social proof tactics. Customer testimonials – from actual customers paid for their time, or fake ones with hired actors – try to tap into this. So do ads that point out the number of happy customers a company has. Today we also have influencers, paid to push products as if they’re normal, enthusiastic consumers and not someone getting paid to make a pitch. 

Fake customer reviews

Customer reviews are also a big one. Star ratings and comment sections on a product’s listing can be immensely helpful. But they can also be easily rigged. In fact an estimated 30-40% of online reviews are fake. 

Paid-review farms – armies of remote workers who log fake reviews – are responsible for millions of fake reviews every year that retailers can purchase in bulk to help boost their product online. Now with ChatGPT, it’s easier than ever to crank out lots of text for mass fake reviews. 

When you look at reviews on a product, don’t necessarily take the star ratings for granted. Better to look through the comments and find those that seem real – that either include a picture of the product, or that make a point specific to the product instead of a generic note like “great product!”

#5 – Fear appeals

Let’s turn to advertisers specifically. There are all kinds of appeals marketers use, but fear-based appeals are a classic. The formula: instill, highlight or otherwise remind your customer of a problem/worry/fear, then conveniently offer to sell them the solution. Think about a home security company sending out a promotional email with the subject line “Home invasions up in your area” before telling you they’re running a special on their bestselling alarm system. 

Fear appeals try to get you to take action to avoid a bad outcome. At their most benevolent they give PSAs their punch, cautioning you away from harmful behaviors. For example, warning that if you don’t cut it out with the tobacco, you too could spend the rest of your life talking out of “a big hole in your neck”.

When the action you’re supposed to take is buying something, however, fear appeals have the capacity to become a bit predatory. Health and beauty advertising, for example, is particularly fond of the fear appeal by tapping into one deeply personal anxiety or another. You can trace it back to the 1920s when Listerine introduced the term “halitosis” to its marketing, making the natural phenomenon of bad breath sound like a medical condition in need of treatment. Its ads featured morose young women failing to find love because, as Listerine made sure you knew, “halitosis makes you unpopular”. But fear not! There is a cure. And it is “systematically rinsing the mouth with Listerine. Every morning. Every night.” The implicit message: if you don’t buy this, you will remain a broken person and greatly increase your odds of dying alone. 

Today things are a little subtler – but in many cases only just. Consider hair growth commercials that ask if you really want to be one of those guys who shaves his head, OR if you’d rather pay for a hair treatment – then proceed to show you a lot of men with full heads of hair smiling their way through life, usually with a beautiful woman nearby. The implicit message is much the same. 

The rise of data-driven targeted advertising has made all of this worse. When everything you go online – every search about losing weight or purchase of a teeth whitener- is collected by advertisers via tracking tech like web cookies, the messages about how to fix our perceived flaws only become more capable of finding us at all hours of the day whenever we go online.

Other tips for celebrating the holidays

There are plenty of options for gift giving that don’t involve buying new stuff, including experiences and baked goods. 

Buying refurbished electronics can save you money, and be kinder to the planet. Or consider helping a loved one get a broken item in their life repaired

Unsafe toys from overseas generally don’t go through inspections. Here’s what to watch out for.