Comment by kirse

artificially put in a delay

Makes me wonder if online retailers for luxury/fashion items could increase sales by doing something similar.

Announce the latest fashion item via social media, but make the page take forever to load... maybe throw in a few fake 404s to a percentage of users saying the store's website is overloaded and encourage the user to refresh. Then when the page finally loads there's a limited supply left, and when they put the item in their cart there's a ticking timer because "X" other people are already shopping this item too. Maybe some other last-minute artificial constraints, like people can only check-out with AMEX.

So basically Ticketmaster for luxury goods, except you secretly always have enough in stock.