15 Jul Stop Getting Suckered By The Amazon Prime Day’s Trick

It’s a joke. It really is. It’s the cheapest form of generating sales and getting people to spend money they weren’t planning on spending…and it works. REALLY WELL.

It works so well that Amazon, the biggest retail website in the world next to Alibaba (mainly in China) that people bought 100 million produts during its annual “Prime Day” in 2018. Despite having world class hosting and web support, their site still crashed a few times like a rookie blog page (hasn’t happened yet, but I’m prepared!).

So why is this “trick” so effective? Because of pretty basic marketing and sales psychology…

Why you buy more on Prime Day

Sorry to spoil things for you BUT the deals are not better on Prime Day. Most of them anyway. The things that get heavily discounted are usually junk. Most of these “sales” are the same ones offered at any holiday around the year. So what is it?

It’s a few subtle marketing forces that we need to look at.

The first one is urgency.

Prime Day is only 2 days. The clock is ticking by the time you wake up. You can’t wait for your lunch break at work (if you even wait that long) so you can get online and start scrolling through the deals!

They’ve optimized this too in recent years. Now only certain things are on sale during certain times on Prime Day so you have to keep checking in during these 48 hours of shopping deal heaven (or atleast that’s how they push it).

The second major driving force is exclusivity.

Not everyone can take advantage of today. You have be a member. You have to join the club. This is engrained into our deep lizard brains as a necessity for survival. We have to belong to something. In the early years of humanity, to be alone was to die. We are herd creatures and do not do well alone (this is part of the driving force of the depression epedemic we are in since we are told we are “connected” online and have “friends” but no one ever hangs out in person or has real conversations…we don’t feel like we belong to anything).

So for the small price of $119 a year, you can decide to make Amazon your primary retailer because you have to make the membership worth it, right? They know this and that’s why they know they don’t really have to give the best deals anymore (they don’t) because you aren’t looking anywhere else.

The last trick is the power of FOMO 

Granted there are more factors at work with digital marketing and other things, but this is the last major one I’ll cover today.

With the rise of social media, we are very aware of what everyone else is doing. We are also aware of what they are buying. You can’t walk outside in public without bumping into multiple people who have shopped on Amazon this week.

We want to be part of the craze. We want to get the deals others are supposedly getting. We fear missing out more than we fear spending money we could save or invest. So we spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about.

Buyer beware…

Look, you can buy stuff on Prime Day. It’s fine. But stop lying to yourself about why you are doing it. I hear the lamest excuses ever when it comes to shopping on days like this. Here’s a few lines of thought you may have said to yourself to justify buying something you knew you didn’t need or couldn’t afford at the time.

• “I mean, I was going to buy it anyway.”
• “Well, it’s on sale for $30 from $50 so I’m really saving $20.”
• “My husband/wife just bought this so I deserve something for me too.”
• “I can pay this off next month.”
• “I wasn’t planning to buy a new (insert object) but mine is getting really old so I should go ahead and buy a new one.”

THere’s many more variations of all of these. Just remember this, 99% of people buying on Prime Day aren’t buying things they really need and thought ahead to wait till Prime Day to buy that thing (if it was on sale). And if they did, they aren’t just going to buy that one thing and nothing else.

And this isn’t to demonize Amazon. They’re just the first ones to think of it. Walmart, Target and pretty much anyone with an online store is trying to jump on this momentum and create a “second holiday shopping season”.

These are just businesses trying to make money and I’m just trying to make sure you don’t spend anything you didn’t need to on crap that you don’t really want that bad when that money could do a lot more for you.

So if you read this and still get an Amazon or one of these other sites, its totally okay. Just be smart about what you buy and ask yourself if that “thing” you want is worth the hours of work you sweated over.

And if you miss out on Prime Day, don’t worry, the back to school sales and tax free days are right around the corner ready to take your money!