That may be true but we don't know that it is true.
When I started my selling software, I priced with something.99 too. I did this because everyone else did. I was unfamiliar with these sorts of things so I followed on.
I am sure that in some business at some point, there was a big positive in switching to that sort of pricing.
When I switched my software to whole numbers, I did not notice a drop in sales. Things continued to grow. Of course, my business is one data point and a small one.
How much of why we tend to do this is because, historically or normally, that is how we've seen it done?
Because you are selling software and your target audience are either business, enterprise or computer engineers.
The trial of whole number pricing keeps coming up in Consumer and Retail every 10- 15 years and EVERY time the test shows .99 works. Despite how most of us and even my younger self hated it.
That’s pretty ingenious to call people dumb. This is psychology and these tricks work on you even if you trivially understand that 3.99 is not feasibly cheaper than 4.00 — your brain simply processes information non-stop in the background and you are affected by this. Hell, there was even a study that people who claim they don’t fall for these kind of marketings tricks are more susceptible to fall for this, so, take what you want from it.
Also, even knowingly false propaganda has an effect on you.
Ingenious? Or disingenuous? Regardless, I agree with you, "tricks" and "dumb" was not said derogatorily, I meant basically what you said, that humans are biologically "dumb" in terms of falling for these "tricks," similarly to how optical illusions work. It seems you summarized my point better than I could.
When it is so well known, at some point it isn’t a “trick” anymore, right?
It isn’t as if retailers can fight reality.
Or that they can “come clean” by putting fine print under prices explaining why they are ending prices in 9. Which would create a major distraction messing with any sale.
It is just real-world reliable wackiness that both sellers and purchasers should be aware of.
There is no purely objective way to relate to selling and purchasing prices. Short of very simple scenarios where a spreadsheet actually captured all the real criteria.
Many products make people happier if the price is higher. Is that happiness bump a fraud, or the point?
Just remember to ask for $199,999.99 salary in your next interview!
> Or that they can “come clean” by putting fine print under prices explaining why they are ending prices in 9. Which would create a major distraction messing with any sale.
Why would they do that? That might lessen their sales if people knew of the effect, as a nocebo.
As you consider the issue this phrase I think is the best synopsis of your thoughts: When it is so well known, at some point it isn’t a “trick” anymore, right
And yet we fall for the same tricks again and again. The most politically pressing? The number of people - internationally - who believe in a strongman leader.
MLMs also occur to me. We know MLMs so well that we've literally written laws against them. There are movies, articles, conversations. And yet, every single year, tons of people fall for them.
What other very well-known tricks do people fall for HN?
FOMO (invite only), trial periods, and decoy pricing are a few tricks I've fallen for in the past. I try to be vigilant, but sometimes it's just too much.
what sort of software were you selling? Was it an app that is priced under 10 bucks? That would be very different from some enterprise software costing $500.
They were being polite because you were flat out wrong: a walk through a shopping centre gives you absolutely zero information about whether prices chosen have been tested or were picked by throwing darts at a calculator. It just tells you what prices those shops have chosen to sell things for, nothing at all about the reasoning behind those prices.
And the OK response is similarly being nice because if one thinks that the retailers for the past 100 years haven't extensively tested pricing, both in the real world and via simulations, they are naive to a large degree as to how businesses work.
And many physicians still recommend putting ice on sprained ankles 5x per day to reduce the “harmful” swelling.
Even though the abundance of research now shows icing delays the infiltration of proteins, hormones, and cells that aid in healing processes (and can even cause further tissue damage).
Practices like this stick around because of the desire to be seen making proactive recommendations with putative benefit.
With the dresses there is clearly something odd happening. In all cases except one the cheapest dresses sold the fewest items even compared to ones that were $10 more expensive.
> Even though the abundance of research now shows icing delays the infiltration of proteins, hormones, and cells that aid in healing processes (and can even cause further tissue damage).
When I was looking for evidence about the efficacy of ice to speed recovery, I found it very challenging. I would be grateful if you could share some of the abundance.
>Practices like this stick around because of the desire to be seen making proactive recommendations with putative benefit
One manifestation of this phenomenon in it's extreme form is cancer diagnosis and treatments. Barring a few exceptions, most cancer treatments are useless.
Reminds me of people who tried selling sturdy repairable phones with longer battery life. Even when people complained about battery issues etc. They kept buying the thinnest flagship. Mass markets are mass market.
> Reminds me of people who tried selling sturdy repairable phones with longer battery life.
My brother buys these. They survive up to a year in his "care", rather than the usual 3-4 months of flimsier phones. They all end up with cracked screens within months though.
Almost no mainstream consumer electronics nowadays are meant for people who lead active lives (outside of planned and streamlined activities like going to the gym or running) - because the people as a whole generally don't live active lives. If you happen to be an outlier, making your phone survive becomes a serious logistical issue. Sadly carrying one is a necessity in this day and age.
Another example: Many offroad vehicles/trucks nowadays won't survive days of the advertised use-cases without serious damage and are often utterly unsuited for it (the cybertruck isn't an outlier here). These things are being sold to people who like to play pretend. Manufacturers cross their fingers and hope you don't actually.
Notable exceptions to the rule are things like satellite communicators and some dedicated GPS map devices. They seem to have no issue surviving many phones with their own screens and functionality intact. Their manufacturers know you wouldn't buy them if you didn't plan to use them in the advertised conditions.
Get your brother a glass screen protector for his phone. I haven't cracked a phone screen in a decade yet I've gone through many cracked screen protectors.
They're just going to crack right along with the screen. The form factor of modern phones combined with the fact that they're made from materials that will break rather than survive some deformation is a death sentence. These things being in the wrong pocket as you carry something heavy, or merely you sitting on them, will immediately crack their screens and hard plastic in half. The devices are just too big and flat. Any attempt at creating rugged variants usually consists of surrounding those fragile off-the-shelf consumer parts with copious amounts of padding. Now it's even bigger and the added weight is not going to help with surviving drops.
Look at the form factor of something like the Garmin eTrex[1] series and it should be immediately apparent why these devices can outlive about a dozen phones. Sit on it, throw it on the ground, put it in a backpack and throw it down a cliff, they'll be fine. Maybe dented and scratched, but they'll still help you find your way. They're small devices that are very round-ish in every dimension, and they're also pretty light, meaning there's very little energy that needs to be dissipated when they impact something.
Adding padding and protection only helps up to a point. To make smartphones actually durable, you'd need to take away from them. That means little or no glass at all. Use light materials that functionally survive deformation and point contact impacts. Also preferably it would run on AA batteries.
Phones, besides the functionality, are fashion accessories and bragging chips, and sometimes chiefly so.
I think it was Vertu who first recognized the potential back in early 2000s, The Matrix (1999) made a visual point of it, and since 2007, Apple has been building their entire strategy based on that, with enormous success.
People who need sturdy phones do exist, are few, and they don't brandish them, because these phones are well-beaten.
I thought it's notorious that sometimes they also don't know what they're doing, being carried by trends and vibes. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half"
The "trend" was started in 1920. In the HN typical bourgeois stance, people here are of course immune to cheap tricks like .99 price ; and will reject it as "non-science", a very unscientific way to reject something on the basis of who makes the science.
Yes, that's the point of the quote, but the point of the poster you're replying to is that wasting half your budget would be considered gross incompetence in any other department.
"Half the lines of code I write are useless, I just don't know which half." - an incompetent coder
"Half the time I spend on the phone is wasted, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent salesperson
"Half of my menu is inedible, I just don't know which half" - an incompetent restauranteur
I don't know, you see plenty of people stating they only do X hours of real work in a given day. That sounds an awful lot like the same basic idea.
If I think about it too, half the lines of code being wasted is probably a relatively reasonable measure for writing code. Not because they're actually literally useless, but because you write a lot of scaffolding, a lot of first passes and a lot of code that will be a dead end or superseded before you're done. If you knew before you started exactly what lines of code you'd need to write, you'd be much more efficient, but we don't, so we write a lot of "waste" code too.
> "Half the lines of code I write are useless, I just don't know which half." - an incompetent coder
Legacy code in a nutshell. On some blue moon you get a chance to do a clean refsctor, but otherwise business doesn't care if 90% of the code is useless.
Even as the refactorer, you know that refactoring can be anywhere from throwing away simple unused code, to removing a seeming unneeded line and causing a forest fire. I imagine that's the equivalent with advertising (i.e I agree with you).
That's easy to say, but when it comes to shopping at the store, picking up several items and not actively thinking about it, are you really sure you aren't unconsciously interpreting that 9.99 differently from 10? Personally, I like to think that doesn't work on me, but at the same time I've caught myself saying something was '9 dollars' when I've been distracted and it was in fact 9.99.
And even if 9.99 really is 10 for you, it could mean that you're different than most people, rather than the methodology being faulty.
I found it odd that my girlfriend would say out the cents, because personally I have always been rounding up, and never considered the cents, for example.
I try to keep two things in my head when filling a grocery cart, an accurate tally of dollars and a numberless sense of "where in the dollar the cents remainder is presently", like the position of a progress bar on a screen. I find a remembered visual progress bar does not distract me from the arithmetic, and when I spot one of those silly prices ending in .95 or .99 the bar resets to a tiny bit and I add a dollar. My mental progress bar generally jumps in approximate ~1/4 steps and when the total is accurate to within $2 with many items that is a win.
When I started my selling software, I priced with something.99 too. I did this because everyone else did. I was unfamiliar with these sorts of things so I followed on.
I am sure that in some business at some point, there was a big positive in switching to that sort of pricing.
When I switched my software to whole numbers, I did not notice a drop in sales. Things continued to grow. Of course, my business is one data point and a small one.
How much of why we tend to do this is because, historically or normally, that is how we've seen it done?