appliedUrgency and scarcity5 min read

Using urgency and scarcity without inventing them

A countdown that starts again when you refresh the page is a false claim with a clock on it, and UK law now bans it outright.

What you'll be able to doTell real urgency and scarcity apart from invented versions, know what UK, US and EU regulators have said about false deadlines and stock claims, and brief urgency tests that present true constraints more clearly.

A test result comes back showing that a countdown timer on the product page lifted conversion. It’s significant, the agency is pleased, and someone is already asking whether it can go on the category pages too. Before anyone ships it, ask one thing. What happens when the timer reaches zero?

If the answer is that the offer ends and the price goes back up, you have a real deadline and a test that made it more visible. If the answer is that the timer starts again, or that the “sale” has been running since spring, you have a false claim that happens to convert, and the result tells you how well a lie works rather than anything you can build on.

Real urgency is information

Plenty of urgency is true and helpful. “Order by 2pm for next-day dispatch” tells someone whether a gift will arrive in time. “Sale ends Sunday at midnight” helps them decide whether to buy now or wait for payday. “Three left in size 10” saves a wasted trip back next week. Event capacity, limited production runs and seasonal stock are all real constraints, and customers are better off knowing about them.

The test of whether urgency is fair is whether the customer would want to know it even if it made them less likely to buy today. A dispatch cut-off passes. A timer invented to stop someone comparing prices elsewhere doesn’t.

The invented version

The fake versions are common and easy to recognise once you know what to look for. Countdown timers that reset on refresh or start fresh for every visitor. A permanent “ends tonight” banner. “Only 2 left” on every product regardless of stock. “14 people are looking at this” with no indication of what they’re looking at or when.

There are a lot of them about. A Princeton team crawled around 11,000 shopping sites in 2019 and found 1,818 instances of dark patterns on 1,254 of them. That included 393 countdown timers across 361 sites, with examples where the offer was still available after the timer had run out, and 632 low-stock messages across 581 sites. The authors also found that many of these came from off-the-shelf third-party tools, which is worth knowing, because a timer can arrive on your site with a plugin and nobody in the business ever decides to lie.

What regulators have said

In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lists practices that are unfair in all circumstances. Paragraph 7 of Schedule 20 is falsely stating that a product will only be available for a limited time. That’s a banned practice, so there’s no argument to be had about whether it affected anyone’s decision. The CMA had been working on this before the Act. Its 2022 work on online choice architecture named false scarcity and urgency as a harm, it opened an investigation into a mattress retailer’s countdown timers and discount claims in November 2022, and in March 2023 it wrote openly to businesses saying urgency claims, including countdown timers, scarcity and “act fast” messages, must be transparent and must not mislead or pressure people unfairly.

The CMA has also shown what it expects from “people are looking” messages. In 2019 six large hotel booking sites gave it commitments to stop giving a false impression of a hotel’s availability or popularity, to stop rushing customers into booking, and to stop placing sold-out hotels in results to create pressure.

In the US, the FTC’s 2022 staff report on dark patterns covers design that creates false beliefs, including fake urgency and scarcity. In the EU, Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive bans falsely stating that a product will only be available for a very limited time in order to get an immediate decision, and Article 25 of the Digital Services Act bars online platforms from designing interfaces that deceive or manipulate users or materially distort their ability to make free and informed decisions.

None of this is legal advice, so get proper advice for your own site. The direction across all three is the same, and none of it is subtle.

How to test urgency without lying

The fair version of an urgency test takes a constraint that already exists and makes it easier to see. Move the dispatch cut-off from the delivery page to the product page. Show the real end date of a real sale. Show actual stock when it’s low, from the live feed, and say which size or variant is running out. If you show how many others are looking, say what that number means, the way the hotel commitments require sites to say that others may be searching for different dates.

A good hypothesis names the customer’s problem. “People abandon because they don’t know whether it will arrive before the weekend” leads to a dispatch message you can test and learn from. “Add urgency” leads to a timer.

Watch the measurement too. Urgency can pull purchases forward in time without adding many new ones, so a lift during the test can be followed by a dip once it ends. Check revenue over a period that runs past the test, and set guardrail metrics for returns, cancellations, complaints and repeat purchase, because pressure tends to show up in regret later.

What to ask an agency

Where does the number or the deadline come from, and can we see the source? What happens when it reaches zero? Does it reset per session or per visitor? Is it built in-house or does it come from a plugin, and who checks the plugin’s settings? Has anyone with legal responsibility seen it? And if the variant wins, would we be comfortable explaining exactly how it works to a customer who asked?

If the answer to that last one is no, the result isn’t one you can ship, however good the number looks.

Put it to work

List every urgency or scarcity message on your site, including anything added by a plugin. For each one, write down where the number or deadline comes from and what happens when it runs out.

There is no right answer. Write yours first, then compare.

Sources

Shoshin is written by Another Web is Possible. Lessons are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.Our promise.