The Latest False Scarcity B.S. – Traffic Anarchy
by Antone Roundy | 14 Comments | Ethics
You've seen it before, even if you didn't know it. The sales page screams "Buy now! Only 100 23 copies left!" Then you come back a month later and it still says "Buy now! Only 100 23 copies left!" Either the product ain't selling or somebody's lying.
One of the latest big sellers on ClickBank is called Traffic Anarchy. Supposedly, only 350 copies were going to be sold. But is that true? Let's check.
We can't log into the seller's ClickBank account to see how many sales they've made. And frankly, there's no way to know exactly how many copies were sold. But ClickBank does publish a number that's guaranteed to be less than or equal to the actual number sold: gravity.
"Gravity" is based on the number of affiliates who've made a sale of a product. (for the exact formula, see my explanation of how ClickBank calculates Gravity). Each affiliate has sold at least one copy of the product, so the actual number of copies sold cannot be less than the gravity score.
Here's a graph of the gravity score for Traffic Anarchy (from Instant Affiliate Accelerator):
To be precise, Traffic Anarchy's gravity, as of last night, was 591.03. So we know that at least 592 copies have been sold.
I'm no lawyer, but that looks like false advertising to me.
September 1st, 2010 at 11:32 pm
I've always thought those types of things, along with countdown clocks and the like, were bogus. I guess it works though because I have purchased things online because the timer was about to run out, or because the page said "I would never see this deal again" or the amount of product "left" was getting low.
I don't know if you could call it "false" advertising unless the product contained something other than what was advertised. It's more like marketing trickery. Creating a "sense of urgency" to make a potential customer break out their wallet and order.
Brian
September 2nd, 2010 at 5:47 am
Nice post Antone,
I am at the point now when I see sales copy like that and just close the tab, hopefully, never to cross the web page again.
Got any more sites that have blatant lies in their copy, might be a good article series?
September 2nd, 2010 at 6:43 am
Good one, Antone. You caught them red-handed.
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:06 am
This has been driving me crazy for ages, and I have also seen it heavily abused on bonus offers as well.
Just 20 bonuses available... yet somehow top of the leader board on a high ticket launch with $150K in affiliate commissions.
And that was a midway point before a final push..
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:51 am
Brian,
The reason it could be called "false advertising" is because the implication is that a limited number of people will be able to use the software, reducing potential competition between buyers. (In some cases, this is explicitly stated as a reason for limiting the number of a product that are sold.)
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:06 am
Jeremy,
It's not something I generally go out of my way to look for. I just happened to notice this one when I was looking up some historical info about Traffic Anarchy's stats on Instant Affiliate Accelerator. I'll keep my eyes open.
September 2nd, 2010 at 9:01 am
I think most of the countdown clocks and amount of product “left†are 95 percent bogus. They simply build that bogus feature into their site to instill a "Sense of Urgency".
A Sense of Urgency has been proven to increase sales and is why this method is used...
September 2nd, 2010 at 9:38 am
Maybe the sales page was being split tested between versions so the total sales could legitimately be higher than 350 units maybe?
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:11 am
Ned,
That logic doesn't work for me. It's like initially claiming you were only going to sell 350, but then changing your mind, removing the limit from the sales page, and thinking "now I can sell more, because I'm no longer claiming I'm only going to sell 350". Or like increasing the limit as you go. No matter how you slice it, you're breaking a promise you used to influence people to buy.
September 6th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Here's an even worse offender: Auto Traffic Avalanche: "Only 234 copies available" - gravity as of yesterday is 1288.29. It's more than 5 times oversold, at a minimum!
Okay, since they're selling 5 products through the same ClickBank ID, it's POSSIBLE that more than 80% of that gravity comes from sales of the other products. But considering that their gravity exploded from next to zero to its current level over the past week or two, and their hop links go to the Auto Traffic Avalanche sales page, it seems doubtful.
September 10th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Same old Clickbank Hype. Read the sales page and they make it sound like it's the greatest product since the invention of the wheel.
Here is what it really is.
It's Submission software.
Here is how it works.
Sign up fo
* the 10 article directories
* the 10 Social networking sites
* the 10 press release sites.
Yes you'll need to manually sign up for all of them.
Once you do that the software will submit to them the information you fill out in the forms.
So what this is really is just another way to submit your work a bit faster.
Will you get loads of traffic? Well no more than if you were to go and submit to all these sites anyways.
Will you save time? Yeah you'll save a bit of time once it's all filled out. But like all submission software... things rarely go smoothly. In fact I've never used any submission software that didn't "hang" and cause errors.
Is it worth the money to create a faster way to submit to these few sites? Perhaps.
But you could also buy Roboform which is very cheap and set up book marks to do it nearly as fast.
Anyways IMIQ is not going to gain me any Keyword Boost as no one searches for it. But it's easy for me to track what I write. So feel free to delete if it's against your policy.
But people need to know these flavor of the month CB products are all hype. And as far as ethics go... hard to find them on Clickbank. Good thing there is a return policy. And using Javascript to make phony countdowns has been going on for more than a decade.
The better question is why are so many people convinced the way to make money is to try and trick people into believing they invented the "new wheel".
This is a horrible practice, but not as bad as the thousands of reviews of software being written by people who have never even run it, let alone own it.
October 23rd, 2010 at 7:47 am
It is "False Advertising" because they lied about how many were left but they still proceed to sell, which misleads the consumer(s). I've fallen for these scammers alot, the sad thing is that they get me time and time again, it all sounds interesting but in the end, its just another scam to get people to buy there product for nothing, cause they don't work, some are just computer generated system thats set up like a toy.
Take this example: We see real Cash Registers in stores etc... Manufacturers make toy cash registers for kids to play with, now days apparently computer software programs have fooled us into believing that the systems work, but they're just like the toys, they really don't work. So if the Ad says only 50 left or available, and they continue to sell, then it is "FALSE ADVERTISING" afterall its all for the money.
October 23rd, 2010 at 10:25 pm
It's happening again. This time, ironically, it's a product called "White Hat Copycat" from Tim Bekker. In two days, gravity has gone from negligible to 354.73. The sales page claims that only 250 copies were to be sold.
Tim's also doing something I'd be insulted by (at best) if I'd bought from his main sales page: if you try to leave without buying, you get sent to a page that offers you a $10 discount for the exact same product.
You don't have to do anything else for it, and nothing is taken out. So basically, if you're a good customer and buy without trying to leave the sales page, you get a worse deal than if you try to leave.
I have no problem with people presenting a different offer to people who are leaving -- for example, a lower price for a package with less features. But if I'd paid full price and then found out about the discount offer, do you think I'd ever buy from the same person again? Not likely.
October 25th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Updates:
* Gravity for "White Hat Copycat" has gone to 510.056.
* Auto Traffic Avalance is down to 545.446 after its initial burst, but it's still selling (its gravity would be dropping about twice as fast if it weren't), and the sales page still says only 234 available.
* Traffic Anarchy is down to 155.05, but it's also still selling, and still says only 231 copies.