Scarcity Marketing Tactics: How Fake Urgency Boosts Conversions

Creating urgency in your marketing works—until it doesn’t.

Some companies manufacture pressure using fake timers, false supply limits, or scarcity claims that never expire.

In small doses, it boosts conversions. But at scale, it draws regulators.

Marc Lou’s Scarcity Tactics: How Fake Timers and Moving Discounts Trick Buyers

Marc Lou’s projects, especially ShipFast, are a masterclass in artificial urgency.

His landing page currently reads:

“$100 off for the first 7,250 customers (11 left)”

But that number? It keeps moving. When 7,250 gets hit, it bumps to 7,500. The clock never stops ticking. The deal never expires. The urgency is fake.

This isn’t new. Marc Lou has used fake timers tied to made-up “holiday” discounts and promotional dates that reset constantly. The result is the illusion that time is running out—even though it never is.

In this Reddit thread, commenters pointed out that while technically everyone does get the discount, framing it as “limited” or “ending soon” when it’s not is deceptive.

Supermarkets can legally run discounts by rotating what’s on sale. For instance, Tesco might discount 2L bottles of Pepsi for 4 weeks, then switch to 6-packs for the next cycle.

It makes each offer technically time-bound, even if a Pepsi product is always on sale. That’s how big-box stores avoid false advertising claims.

The “First X Customers Only” Strategy That Skates the Line

There’s a way to use scarcity honestly—sort of. Say your store usually gets 75 orders per day. You could offer a free gift to the first 100 customers. If you’re a larger brand, you can stretch it to the first 1,000. Here’s how that’s usually played:

• Email 1 (morning): “Only the first 500 customers get a free gift.”

• Email 2 (noon): “Just 252 left.”

• Email 3 (evening): No numbers. Just “Free gift with your order.”

Technically, you never committed to stopping the promotion. The emails simply imply scarcity. No one checks the backend. No one tracks who was “first.” And since you never said the deal was ending later that day, the evening email avoids legal trouble. It’s designed to move volume without making promises you can’t back up.

If you take this too far—by showing a fake countdown or an inventory number that never drops—you risk slipping into outright deception. But if your copy stays flexible, most people don’t notice. Or care.

Limitled Supply, the brains behind many successful DTC companies, recommends this strategy.

Why the FTC Doesn’t Care—Until You Cross $100M or Get Reported

Alen Sultanic recently pointed to an example where this tactic did get attention: Publishing.com, one of Alex Hormozi’s portfolio companies.

They sold an AI-powered side hustle model and scaled hard. Eventually, the FTC opened an investigation. Why? High sales volume and customer complaints.

The investigation wasn't for the same thing but it only came into effect because Publishing became big.

That’s the pattern. If you’re pulling in $2M–$10M quietly, the FTC probably doesn’t care. But once you're doing $50M–$100M in annual sales and the complaints start piling up, regulators take notice. It’s not just about what’s “legal.” It’s about whether enough people are mad enough to force oversight.

That’s why small indie brands can run countdowns and flexible urgency offers without consequence. But if you’re planning to scale or raise money, you’ll want to clean it up.

Remember, everything is legal if you scale it up. See how OpenAI and all the AI companies never got fined for training the AI companies on copyrighted work.

How to Use Scarcity Ethically—and Still Drive Urgency

If you want to stay out of trouble and still boost conversions, borrow the tactics of big retailers. Here’s what works:

• Rotate your offers. Like supermarkets, don’t run the same discount forever. Change the product, the bundle, or the offer type every few weeks.

• Avoid fake numbers. “Only 11 left” is risky unless you actually track inventory. Use soft urgency like “while supplies last” or “launch bonus ends soon.”

• Split your offers by time, not quantity. “Offer ends tonight” is cleaner than “Only 100 available,” especially if you're handing it out to everyone.

• Use disappearing urgency. Front-load scarcity in the morning, reduce it mid-day, and drop it at night. This creates FOMO without writing anything technically false.

These tweaks preserve urgency while keeping your brand out of the grey zone—because once the numbers get big, the margin for error gets small.

Top Tweets of the day

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Rabbit Holes

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