How to Create Urgency in Ecommerce | #677

What I love about Sylvie's example here is that it's not just urgency for urgency's sake.

She knows that a gift with purchase actually adds value to the customer experience.

She's just thinking of ways that she can honestly give the customer an insight into the can make better and more timely decisions.

This automatically drives urgency, but it's done in the right way.

Now, this is just one tactical example of how urgency can be incorporated in the e-commerce experience, but it's not manufactured.

Consider that there are pretty much two honest sources of urgency, a real limit on quantity of product or a real end date, usually for promotion.

Before any urgency message goes into your cart or your checkout or any other page on your site, have a think about which of those two quantity or time is your limitation.

So say you're running a gift with purchase and you have 300 units of the gift.

Free gift while stocks last is true, but it's not very compelling.

But a better version of this would be there are only 50 of these remaining.

That's the kind of urgency that we're aiming for.

Or maybe you are running a seven-day sale.

A countdown that appears on day six and counts down to when the sale actually ends, tells the customer that the sale is going to end.

And there's a reason to act straight away.

Don't expect people to be looking at the fine print to see when your sale ends.

This is a great use of urgency because it's useful.

In some categories, the scarcity is built into the product itself.