Get Your Tickets Now, Limited Seats are Available

In the real world, sellouts are important. Really important. You want a full arena/stadium. Soccer in the US learned this lesson. Instead of having 27,000 people in a stadium of 70,000, they built a bunch of 20,000 - 30,000 seat stadiums that fill up. Now you have fomo (fear of missing out).

At the PPA pro pickleball event in Mesa last week, you could buy one of two ticket packages for Thursday Round of 16 Play.

• $25 to walk the grounds (where pros played on three courts).
• $40 to sit at Center Court and walk the grounds if you so desired.

I spent $25 because I like to walk the grounds. On Center Court? Here's the view from outside the court, where you could look-in but not enter.

Yeah, it was full and it was loud. You could hear the cheers from all across the grounds.

Now, that's maybe a 1,000 seat court (many seats are blocked off to help the players see the ball better). They probably could have sold 2,500 seats. But by having a limited supply of tickets, you fill the place up and create fomo / buzz.

What comparable situation do you have in your e-commerce business? If you are struggling to answer that question, you are part of the problem.

If you expect to sell 100 widgets, you are always better off buying 75 widgets and selling out and creating fomo with your customer base than you are having 140 widgets then selling 105 of them and having to liquidate 35 (but yeah, they're available in all channels, so #omnichannel) at half-off thereby diluting your pricing authority.

And if you expect to sell 100 widgets, why not tell the customer you only have 75 of 'em, and then use an ACTION STREAM to communicate that you now have 45 of 'em, and then 25 of 'em, then create a contest to predict when you'll sell out of 'em? Why not? What stops you from doing that?

Fashion brands have been doing this forever.

Are you ever worried that Macy's will run out of ... anything?

One of the most interesting meetings I was ever in during my corporate days was at about 7:00pm at night ... two merchants just going at each other. One merchant advocated having 1,000 dresses forecasted perfectly, available in each channel. #omnichannel! The other merchant argued that you buy 500 dresses when you know you can sell 1,000 of 'em and you sell through them quickly and set the expectation with the customer that if the customer doesn't act with any sense of urgency the customer will be perpetually out of luck.

• Merchant #1 was ultimately fired.
• Merchant #2 was proven right, repeatedly.

Go to the Hot Deals page on Headphones.com (it's sorted from best seller to worst seller). Look at all of the sold out or backordered items. They're teaching you to act now.

Create some urgency, folks!