Why YSK: Online platforms, particularly some very prominent offenders, may artificially spike prices before creating “discounts”. Whether this is intentional or the result of third party sellers fighting amongst themselves, I cannot say. Either way, don’t blindly purchase something because of a deal (camelcamelcamel is great to see price history if you just care about Amazon). Besides, if your sole motivation to purchase something is based on a discount, you might be better off cutting consumption instead.
Source: I run fetchnotifs. While checking the logs this morning, I was scared to death I deployed a bug to production—Nope, it’s just that day of the year.
Why are they doing this? Sure, it increase their short term profit, but this surely erode their users’ trust overtime. If they keep doing this, sooner or later people would no longer trust any kind of discount day anymore.
I work with online sales and that’s not what happens at all. Fake discounts just works, sadly, and people just won’t learn. I don’t really know why, maybe they use the “discount” as an excuse to themselves just to buy more stuff.
Totally. See JCPenny and their “sales.” The people who shop there even know they aren’t real sales they’re just addicted to getting a perceived deal.
JCPenny tried to stop doing the fake sales and just go with actual pricing and it nearly broke them so they went back to the fake sales. They were even completely honest about it, letting everyone know they are the actual prices and the sales were fake and people weren’t happy about it until they went back to the fake sales.
No one in money cares about long term anything. That’s why. They want the money now. Tomorrow is a problem for tomorrow.
How many people will even notice or read about it? It’s not that many of the customers overall.
If it’s a net gain they don’t care about dissatisfaction or some lost customers.