5.6 KiB
[Recommendations?] Sales psychology?
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 0
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Created: 2015-01-19T13:25:26
Post:
[deleted]
Comments:
u/Sceptically [+5] (12 hours later)
Mark prices down regularly. People will buy overpriced crap that's marked down when they wouldn't buy it at that price if it were the "full price". Keep things on special as long/often as you legally can.
Market yourself as having a sale on, too. And when one sale finishes, obviously another one begins.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (2 hours later)
Are you selling online or in meatspace?
If you're selling online, the most brilliant sales trick I ever saw worked like this (I don't remember the web site, sadly):
It's an auction site with a twist. You buy virtual bid tokens, and you spend one token every time you bid. Things start with ridiculously low prices -- $1 for an iPad -- and they have a short sell time, maybe an hour. Here's the trick: in the last ten seconds, any bid resets the clock to ten seconds. This takes advantage of sniping -- everyone who tries to snipe will end up re-bidding to get the thing, usually much higher than the price would otherwise go. The fact that you're paying a bid token -- something that directly translates to money but feels like not-money -- also jacks up how much people spend.
Combine that with the "auction a dollar" trick where people are obligated to pay their bids even if they don't win and you could rake in the money. It's a little bit evil, though.
u/None [+2] (3 hours later)
[deleted]
u/eaglejarl [+3] (5 hours later)
I don't remembe if this is in "Influence" or not, but look up price anchoring and (separately) perceived value. tl;dr: have a low, middle, and high price and people will tend to choose the middle. Have a high price and people will perceive you as more luxurious/ valuable (oversimplification, obviosuly). Real thing, though -- it's hard / impossible to sell software to a big company if it costs $19.99. They want something that costs four digits, even if it's the same thing. Part of this is how their budgets and payment systems work, but part is also just the perceived value.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (5 hours later)
Ooh, as long as we're maximizing evil: let's make bid tokens come only in packs of 100 for $5 each, and we'll set them to auto-renew when you run out!
u/JackStargazer [+3] Primordial Apologist (2 days later)
All we need now is to add in microtransactions and oh my this has just become a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the modern gaming industry.
So, yeah. Basically look at what EA and Ubisoft do, and then do that.
Ooo, Preorders! See if you can incorporate that. Artificial scarcity is another good one.
u/None [+1] (5 hours later)
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u/eaglejarl [+1] (6 hours later)
Sorry, but it does.
u/bbrazil [+2] NERV (6 hours later)
That's known as a penny auction.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (7 hours later)
Ah, cool, I hadn't heard the term before. Thanks.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (12 hours later)
A penny auction is slightly different, and far more evil. It's when you have to pay your highest bid even if you don't win the auction. I heard of an "auction site" that did penny bids - to the surprise of absolutely nobody, they were eventually shut down for fraud.
u/UNWS [+1] (4 hours later)
What is the auction a dollar trick
u/eaglejarl [+1] (5 hours later)
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (8 hours later)
So obviously that link is incorrect on calling the individual bids "rational". They're only rational if you expect the other players to stop bidding and let you win.
u/None [+2] (3 hours later)
Robert Cialdini's Influence is a good place to start, though beyond that you'll likely have to read specific studies to find unbiased sources.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (10 hours later)
The .99 thing at the end of prices is a simple matter of psychology. Individual pennies are worth so little these days that it's almost criminally stupid to keep them in circulation, at least in the US. Because they are worth so little, people ignore them, only noticing the dollar amounts.
So, if you sell something for 4.99, and someone else sells it for 5.00, the average consumer will buy from you. If you are selling in cyberspace, you can likely charge a little premium on top of shipping that they won't even notice, because they never see that the other guy actually charges less to ship the item. In brick and mortar space, you can probably get away with a few extra pennies here and there on other peripheral products associated with your item.
Now - variations on the 0.99 psychology. Some retailers use the pennies part of the cost for subtle signaling of special properties of an item that the interested buyer can't know without being on the inside. For instance ending in 0.92 might mean it's an open-box item. 0.49 might indicate a display item with damage. 0.79 might mean a discontinued item. These price variants are likely to draw the eye of a customer, not because they care about a few pennies, but because it looks different. The customer then asks the employee about the price, because it's usually a deal, and the employee now has an opportunity to dispose of a product that the store wants gone.
Yes, I used to work in Bricks and Mortar retail, in the last millennium.