Imagine for a second that you've set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we know about consumer behavior.
Your goal is to separate people from their money as efficiently as possible. What would you do? You'd probably try to draw buyers in with bargain prices. You'd pit them against one another in an auction. You'd ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they're spending. On top of that, you'd ask for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build to hundreds of dollars.
But relax. Someone's beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo.com. It's an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them in to what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.
The Big Money: The Pennies Add Up at Swoopo.com - washingtonpost.com.
Oh, man. Swoppo. If you’d pitched this idea to a lot of investors, I gotta imagine many of them wouldn’t get it, and wouldn’t give you the money. Unless they’d worked in a casino or had taken classes in behavioral science.
It bottles up the irrational behavior of somebody trying to “win their money back” (and those are quotes of dripping gooey sarcasm) at a gaming table and puts them into play. Absolutely incredible. Read the whole story and see how a $2k piece of equipment can sell for less than that AND make a ton of money for the site.
It’s somewhat like the poker table in the casino, where everybody playing pays to play, but (split pots aside) there’s only two winners; the high hand and the casino, who takes the rake.
Outstanding. Scary. Wonderful.
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