| In my opinion, you're skating on thin ice with this explanation. I have no doubt that this is exactly how the feature works. However, you're posting in a community full of entrepreneurs and marketers. We KNOW that presenting scarcity (real or not) is a great way of influencing the buy decision. You will never convince anyone here that the wording of the badge wasn't deliberately designed to promote the feeling of scarcity. What I'm suggesting, however, is that this isn't really a bad thing. It's a little tough to call you guys out on the practice of optimizing the site for sales... we'd all be very hypocritical if we did that (since the next popular article on HN is just as likely to be a treatise on the fine art of A/B testing the wording on a "try it now" button). I think what everyone is asking for is just that you say "yes, our tests showed this wording worked very well to increase purchases. However, perhaps we went a little too far. We'll reword the button." What you SHOULDN'T expect is for any of your peers on this site to honestly believe the connotation of your explanation, which seems to be "the badge OBVIOUSLY represents the number of seats left at this price, instead of seats left on the flight. But since a few people have this weird interpretation, we'll change it just for you." But you know what... I suspect it's all moot. I'm sure the way it's worded now ultimately generates the highest sense of urgency in the customer, but "1 left at this low price" probably generates a similar urgency. |
We agree that we need to work on improving the design of the feature and we will be doing just that. “X seats left at this price” is a better label, but may be too long to fit for the way it is currently designed, so we will need to think about how we can best convey the information better.