Do 'only 2 left' messages make people buy?

Sometimes, and only when the message is true. The competition regulator's own evidence review says telling people something is scarce can make them more likely to buy, and then says the evidence on which kinds of message work is "mixed". A false stock warning is a different matter: it's on the UK's list of banned sales practices, and the CMA's guidance says most of those practices are crimes as well as carrying fines of up to £300,000, or 10% of worldwide turnover if that's higher.

Our interest, stated first. We build websites and landing pages and we run paid ads, and stock warnings and "people are looking" messages get sold as a way to make those pages sell more. So the answer that would suit us is that they always work. They don't.

This is part of our series on sale prices and urgency, checked. It reports what the evidence and the regulators say, with links to each source; it is not legal advice.

What the evidence says

The example the review gives is a field experiment in which scarcity claims got more people clicking "add to cart". That's clicks rather than sales, which is not the same thing, and we found no independent study of what these messages do to a small shop's actual sales.

Can you use them legally?

Only when they're true, and only when they give a fair picture. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans "Providing (including passing on) materially inaccurate information about market conditions or about the availability of the product with the intention of inducing the consumer to acquire the product under conditions that are less favourable than normal market conditions". In plainer words: you can't tell people stock is short, when it isn't, to get them to buy on worse terms than they otherwise would. The advertising code says the same thing.

A message can be literally true and still mislead. The CMA's own example is a pop-up saying "Be quick! We've sold 10 in the last 5 mins." when "the trader's stock levels are high and there is no need for consumers to hurry". Its guidance on urgency claims adds three more: a low-stock warning when new stock is arriving shortly, a "looking now" figure borrowed from a different period, and a count of sales across a whole brand shown as if it were one product's.

What to do instead

• Only show stock levels that come live from your own stock system.
• Check what your plug-in is actually counting, over what period, and for which product.
• Leave the message off altogether if you're restocking shortly.
• Don't pile the pressure on. A false countdown, a low-stock warning and an inflated "was" price on the same page is exactly the combination the CMA singles out.

When to discount, and how hard to push it, is a question for a digital marketing strategy before it is a question for the page.

The rest of the series covers countdown timers, 'was' prices and how to structure a landing page that sells. Product pages built without any of these risks are part of our websites work.