Chapter 18: Scarcity

The scarcity category of deceptive pattern involves falsely claiming that a product or service is in limited supply, encouraging customers to quickly complete a purchase before the stock runs out. The scarcity deceptive pattern is similar to the urgency deceptive pattern, but urgency is time-based, while scarcity is materials-based.

The low stock message deceptive pattern

HeyMerch’s Shopify app Hey!Scarcity Low Stock Counter is a great example of the low stock message deceptive pattern. This app makes it easy for shop owners to show fake low stock messages like this (outlined below).¹

HeyMerch doesn’t try to hide their intentions, either. Their admin interface encourages merchants to use randomly generated fake figures, as you can...

HeyMerch doesn’t try to hide their intentions, either. Their admin interface encourages merchants to use randomly generated fake figures, as you can see below: ‘Generate the stock data between [3] and [5]’. By the time you read this, it’s possible it may have been banned by Shopify, since their rules explicitly forbid ‘apps that falsify data to deceive merchants or buyers.’²

The high demand message deceptive pattern

The high demand message deceptive pattern is the lazy version of the low stock message. It is simply some text on the page that falsely claims that the item is in high demand. The Scarcity++ Low Stock Counter app by Effective Apps enhances this by adding an animation to the high-demand message, thus drawing attention to it.³ As you can see in the screenshot below, the creators recommend using the message ‘Low in stock!’ and they suggest configuring the app when the stock level drops below ‘a large number (like 1000000) if you’d like the alert to appear for all of your products’.⁴

I’m sure you’ll agree that a stock level in the hundreds of thousands cannot be described as ‘low stock’ – it’s a lie. Perhaps by the time you read this, this product will have been improved or removed from the Shopify app store.