03/09/2026
Scarcity is one of the biases that holds the greatest sway in decision-making. Evidence of its impact as a marketing tool comes, for example, from a 2017 review by Will Browne and Mike Swarbrick Jones. They analyzed 6,700 e-commerce campaigns and found that both limited-supply scarcity and time scarcity are great ways to boost revenue.
Messages highlighting scarcity resulted in an average 2.9% uplift — the highest impact among the 29 message types tested. The third highest was time scarcity, which resulted in a 1.5% increase in sales. As you can see, social proof is also great.
Source: Richard Shotton’s Hacking the Human Mind.