Have you ever been shopping online and found a product you like, and you see a label saying “5 people are looking at this product right now,” and you may even notice it says there are only 2 left in stock?
Now you may be disappointed to learn that in most cases, this is a big con. Yep, these companies are trying to influence you by using well-known psychological tricks.
Going Back
Why would this trick us? Well, let’s go right back to our caveman days. Say you, as a hunter-gatherer, are roaming the wild and you come upon an apple tree and there are 2 apples left on the floor. Yep, options are scarce here, there are only 2 left.
You look over your shoulder and you see another two cavemen walking up the hill directly to the apple tree you are at, with the apples right at your feet. What are you going to do, take the apples or leave them on the ground for the other cavemen to take?
You will take them of course; we need resources and in the wild, we need an instinct to keep us competitive.
These instincts are still in us today, they are survival instincts that have been with us for many years. If something is scarce, we want it. If something is about to be taken by somebody else, we want it.
This type of instinct can keep you alive when foraging for food. It would not be so good if it was a conscious thought; no, this is an instinct, as in we behave this way without even thinking about it.
The Science Behind It
This is based on reactance theory, a theory first put forward by a psychologist called Jack Brehm back in the 1960s. The idea is simple: when we feel like our freedom to choose something is being threatened, we react.
If we don’t take it, somebody else will, and then it’s not a choice we can even make, so instincts kick in and we take action. The second you see “only 2 left” or a countdown ticking down, your brain isn’t thinking about the product anymore; it’s thinking about losing the option to have it.
Robert Cialdini also wrote a book in 1984 called Influence, and honestly, it may be 2026 but it’s well worth a read. He put it simply: opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited. It’s one of his six principles of persuasion and it’s one of the most cited pieces of work in this area.
And it’s not just theory either. There was a study a few years back where researchers tracked people’s eye movements while they shopped for wine online. Products with a scarcity label on them, like “only a few left,” were looked at for longer and were picked more often than products with no label at all. So this isn’t just something marketers assume works; it’s been measured.
If you want to go real deep on the topic, you can read the full study from the University of Tartu.
There’s also a difference worth knowing about between the two main types you’ll see used. “Only 2 left” is quantity scarcity. A countdown timer is time scarcity. Research suggests they actually work on us in slightly different ways: one tends to push us into quick, gut-reaction decisions, while the other can actually make us think about the offer more. So whether it’s time or availability, both produce a response to scarcity, but our brains process them differently.
Scarcity vs. Loss Aversion: What’s the Actual Difference?
So far I’ve talked about scarcity, that’s the “someone might take it” instinct. But loss aversion is a slightly different thing.
Loss aversion comes from work by two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, back in 1979, as part of something called Prospect Theory. Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for this work. Now it’s conceptual, but think about it like this: losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. So if you lose a tenner in the street, this feels worse than finding a tenner feels good.
Loss aversion is about the fear of losing the chance to have it at all. You may never even have owned the thing, but your brain still processes not getting it as a loss, not just a missed gain (what psychologists refer to as psychological ownership). Again, back to the apple tree: if you don’t take it now, some cavemen are coming up behind who will.
A ticking clock taps into loss aversion directly; it makes the losing feel like it’s actively happening right now, in real time, while you’re stood there deciding what to do.
So the two tricks often get lumped together, and marketers use them together on purpose, but they’re pulling different levers in your brain. Scarcity says this is rare. Loss aversion says you are about to lose something.
How Marketers Manipulate This
Marketers deliberately play on these survival instincts online when trying to sell you products or services.
I have seen my wife fall for this online when looking to make a purchase; she said we must hurry as x amount of people are on this page right now. I laughed, although I should not have. You see, a lot of people are totally unaware they are being played in such a way.
You only have to go onto a store like the Shopify App Store and you will see a whole host of apps you can install on your website to promote such urgency. There, you’ll have a whole host of tools based around low stock or countdown timers: “Get it now or it’s gone.”
Does It Work?
The answer is yes, this does work and can increase sales, but I would tread carefully when thinking of using this on your own online store.
First of all, you get shoppers like me who understand this trick, and I do not have a positive perception of its use. So for me, it lowers the brand in my opinion, that they feel they have to resort to such tactics. But I’m not everyone, and this is just how I feel on the topic.
Is It Legal?
The short answer is, it depends entirely on whether it’s true.
If you genuinely have 2 left in stock, fine. If that counter is just there to create pressure and there are actually 200 in the warehouse, that’s a different story.
The CMA, that’s the Competition and Markets Authority here in the UK, has been cracking down on this since 2022 through something called the Online Choice Architecture programme.
Their own example of what they consider a problem is almost identical to what my wife saw: something like “HURRY! 10 people are viewing this now” when in reality the business has plenty of stock. Of course, I am assuming they had plenty in stock. We do seem to have a lot of websites with threadbare stock nowadays where everything is on the edge of being sold out, interesting that.
Two big names in the bed and mattress industry, Emma Sleep and Simba Sleep, both got investigated by the CMA back in 2022 over this exact issue. Their discount claims didn’t add up to the actual savings customers were getting, and their countdown timers and “high demand” messaging were found to be misleading.
It went further with Emma: by October 2024 the CMA had actually started legal action against them over their use of misleading countdown timers and claims about discounts ending, leading to court-endorsed commitments to change their sales practices.
Legally, this sits under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and it’s now backed up by even stronger powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The government has the power to fine up to 10% of global turnover, so in theory, fines can be quite hefty.
The USA has similar principles in place under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans unfair or deceptive practices generally, but there’s no dedicated law written specifically for scarcity claims or countdown timers the way the UK now has. The FTC did call out fake countdown timers by name in a 2022 report on dark patterns, but proper enforcement seems to sit more with individual states than one central regulator running public investigations the way the CMA does. So it’s the same principle on both sides of the Atlantic: real scarcity is fine, fake scarcity isn’t, but the UK’s approach has been far more joined-up and public about it so far.
My Thoughts on the Topic
Do I see many companies taken to court for this? No, I don’t. Do many online retailers still use this practice? Yes, they do.
My honest take on the topic is that if the scarcity is real, use it, it is an effective and fair way to sell. You legitimately may have only a few items left of a particular line, so it’s fair for you to try to push these out the door by stating there are only a few left. I have used this in the past in a legitimate fashion.
But if it’s just made up, you’re not just risking how your brand looks to someone like me; you could potentially be at risk from a legal perspective. If you see it all over a site or on every product, it starts to ring alarm bells for me. If it’s just on a one-off item, or maybe in a sale section, I usually let that slide as potentially legit.
Who knows, the government could decide to crack down on it at some point, so I would urge on the side of caution if you’re only using it to invoke urgency in unwitting customers.
So What Do I Actually Do?
Well, if you take my suggestion and go white hat on this, you need to show the correct stock figures on your website and only show urgency signals when stock is past a certain point.
If you have stock enabled on Shopify or Magento, you need to set up a rule to only show the urgency feature when stock is below a certain point. For most stores, this is where a plugin will do the job. There are genuine low-stock apps out there that watch your real inventory numbers and only fire when it’s actually true.
Where it gets more complicated is if your stock doesn’t live somewhere simple. If you’ve got multiple warehouses, made-to-order products, or stock and production data sitting on another system rather than neatly inside Shopify or Magento, an off-the-shelf plugin won’t have visibility of this information unless it’s synced to your CMS. In that case, you’re better off developing the trigger yourself with bespoke development.
Now the “5 people are looking at this right now” badge is a different beast entirely, and honestly, a lot harder to do properly.
A low-stock trigger is basically a database read. You already have a stock number sitting in a table somewhere; the feature just checks it against a threshold and shows or hides a badge.
A live visitor count is a real-time problem. You need to track who’s actually on that specific product page right now, and do all of that without hammering your database every time someone loads a page.
It’s difficult to get right. Website visits bring a lot of fake traffic, crawlers, and bots, and deciding what counts as a genuine visitor is a whole topic in itself. With the development overhead involved in getting this right, it’s not really worth it for most stores. The majority of sites you see with this feature will be faking it rather than going down the development route, simply because of the complexity involved.
