Last week on the show I was sharing a story about a makeup purchase I made at nine o’clock at night, on the couch, from a brand I’d been following for months. That episode was about everything that happened afterwards and the brand’s missed (or botched, rather) opportunity to set me up as a loyal customer. The four pushy texts sending me discount incentives in the first hour. The week of silence, not even an order shipped email, and the parcel that hadn’t shipped.

But I left something out, because at the time I couldn’t explain it. Aside from the ’something just feels icky’ feeling I had at the time.

Because the shopping experience itself felt off. Not necessarily broken, but it didn’t feel good. And when I finished paying I noticed I felt slightly worse about myself than when I’d started, which is a strange thing to feel about a mascara.

I’ve spent 25 years around digital marketing and conversion optimisation. I started in this game back when people were talking about printing a white pages of website URL’s because google didn’t exist yet. I could literally name every mechanism on that site while it was happening to me, like the timers, the flashing PR logos, the low-stock warnings, the discounts that increased the more multiples I bought, the subscription option sitting below the add-to-cart button with a tick already in it and a tick mark so faint I didn’t see it until after I’d paid. I knew what all of it was, I watched it working on me anyway, and I still came away feeling faintly diminished.

There were so many things flashing at me all at once it was almost overwhelming to the point where I nearly exited the site rather than force my tired brain to actually make a decision.

I’ve been trying to work out why I had this reaction ever since. Because “it gave me the ick” is a feeling, and feelings are not a strategy, so if I’m going to sit here and tell you that the highest-converting playbook in eCommerce is quietly costing you money, I need to be able to explain the mechanism.

So here it is.

Every website contains a prediction about the person visiting it.

Not a stated one, but it’s definitely inferred and baked into the structure of the site and the content or story arc on the site. The way you’ve built your shop is a running theory about who your customer is and what will move her, and your customer can sense it whether or not he or she could put it into words.

A countdown timer predicts that buy sooner based on a FOMO response. A discount that grows when she adds a second item predicts she’ll spend more to feel clever about how much she saved. A pre-ticked subscription box predicts that she isn’t paying close attention and that this can be used. Seventeen thousand reviews shouted across the homepage predict that she is motivated to ‘keep up with the joneses’, to borrow an old fashioned term.

Every one of those is a guess about what makes your customer tick. And when a person with taste, money and a functioning brain lands on a shop built on those guesses, she won’t necessarily object consciously  to the tactics. But she’ll clock it, somewhere in the back of her mind, or the pit of her stomach, that this brand thinks she’s a mark.

That’s the ick. It isn’t aesthetic and it isn’t snobbery. It’s the half-second where you see the brand’s model of you and find it beneath you.

Because here’s the thing about persuasion. Being persuaded doesn’t feel bad. Being persuaded feels great. We love being convinced by something excellent – as long as it feels like we arrived at that decision through our own free will. What feels bad is being misjudged. Being handled. Being addressed as a slightly simpler person than you actually are.

Why you feel it before your customer does

Now, a word of caution here, because I don’t want you walking away thinking this is about your personal taste or that this necessarily applies to everyone.

There’s a body of research on what happens when a person recognises a persuasion attempt as a persuasion attempt. The moment the tactic is identified as a tactic, something in your mind switches. We stop evaluating the offer and start evaluating the motive. The question in your mind changes from “do I want this?” to “what are they doing to me?”. And once that switch flips, no amount of additional persuasion helps, because everything you add is now perceived as evidence.

There’s a related finding about pressure and freedom. When people feel their freedom to choose is being squeezed, they get a drive to restore it. The most available way to restore your freedom in a shop is to leave.

But, as a premium brand owner, here’s why that matters for you specifically. Your detection threshold is unusually low. Mine is even lower. We work in this industry, so we know the mechanisms and tactics being used, so we spot them instantly. Your customer’s threshold is higher, so she may never overtly name a single tactic. She’s probably not going to email you and say your urgency messaging triggered a reluctance to buy.

But she will feel it later and less articulately, and it’s going to come out as “I’ll think about it.”

That’s the version you’ll see, showing up in your analytics as an abandoned cart, and you will almost certainly diagnose it as a pricing problem or a trust problem and go looking for more social proof to add. Which will probably just make it worse…

Two failures stacked

Back to the makeup brand, because there’s a second layer that I think explains why I felt worse rather than just annoyed.

The brand’s whole proposition is care: Formulas that evolve with you. Gentle enough for sensitive eyes. A more considered approach to beauty after forty. 

That’s the promise, and it’s a lovely one and it’s the whole reason I followed them for months in the first place.

But then the behaviour at the point of sale was extraction. The product page was hustling hard to make me add more into my cart, get a subscription attached to it, and get it done before I could think too hard about it.

So – care claimed, but extraction delivered. 

Your gut reads that contradiction faster than your conscious mind does. You don’t think “there’s a values misalignment between the brand narrative and the checkout experience.” You just think: hmmmm.

And then there’s the third thing, which took me longest to see.

That entire product range is built on deficit. Thinning hairline. Dark circles. Lashes that aren’t what they were. Something that won’t sit in those pesky fine lines. Every single product exists because something about me has deteriorated.

Now, I’m not being precious about that. I’m nearly fifty, I’ve bought products in exactly that category, and I’d rather a brand talk to me honestly about my actual face than pretend I’m twenty-three. There is nothing wrong with solving a real problem for a woman who has one.

But look at what gets stacked on top of it. You arrive already positioned as somewhat diminished. And then you get pressured. Deficit, and then coercion.

So I think it was a combination of all these factors that contributed to the “less than” feeling I had. It isn’t incidental and it isn’t a tone-of-voice slip. It’s what the entire site’s structure produces.

Luxury is a transfer of effort

Right. So if that’s the failure, what’s the alternative, and can it work just as well? Of course there is – we’re only half way through the podcast so there’s got to be more to tell, right?!

I’m old enough to remember when our big department stores, like David Jones in Australia, were genuinely wonderful. I remember when my sister and I were kids, our Mum used to shamelessly bribe us with afternoon tea in order to go shopping with her at David Jones without being pains in the bum lol.

There was a man in a tuxedo playing jazz on a grand piano in the foyer. There were beautiful chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. There were beautifully dressed attendants in the lifts – down to the white gloves – so you never pressed a button and you never got lost. The floors were immaculate and fully stocked at the same time, which anyone who’s worked in retail will tell you is much harder than it sounds, and more than enough staff on the floors so you’d never be left waiting. And the catalogues came out like glossy magazines, with enormous amounts of white space, because they could afford to not use every inch of that very thick, premium paper stock.

Of course, David Jones is now just limping along like a three-legged dog still trying to wag its tail, so shopping there is a completely different experience these days!

So for years I filed all of that under nostalgia. Lovely, gone, not coming back, and probably not affordable anyway.

It isn’t nostalgia. It’s a principle, and it still works, and here it is.

Luxury is the transfer of effort from the buyer to the seller.

That’s what every one of those things was. The pianist meant you didn’t have to generate your own sense of occasion. The lift attendant meant you didn’t have to navigate. The white space meant you didn’t have to expend too many brain calories trying to figure out what was on the page. In all cases, somebody else’s resources were being spent so that yours weren’t.

Which is exactly what the really great premium beauty brands are doing now, just with range and design and the digital experience instead of staff. Like, one product per category. A complete routine that fits in a small bag. A founder’s thesis that the beauty industry was drowning women in options, and the white space was simplicity. Somebody has already done the research and curated the best for you, so you are not required to become an expert in order to be allowed to buy.

Now hold that against the discount ladder.

Buy two and save more. Add the subscription for another ten per cent. Get to fifty dollars for free shipping. Combine these three items for a bundle price. Add this other product for an extra discount. Etc etc. That is homework. The customer is having to do a whole lot of arithmetic in order to earn the price and expend a whole lot of brain calories figuring out the best deal, and then we have all collectively agreed to call this a “saving” rather than a “spending”.

It’s the exact inversion. The effort has been transferred to the customer, and then described as generosity.

That’s why it feels more demeaning than generous, and it’s why the seventy-two variant permutations I found on one bundle on that makeup site are not a merchandising decision. They’re a message.

I really miss those amazing excursions to David Jones as a child. I can still almost taste the streusel buns and milkshakes sitting at the very glamorous ‘grown up’ cafe tables in their gourmet food hall!

Reward, or convince?

Now, I can hear the objection, because I’ve had this conversation with clients a hundred times. So you’re telling me I can never run an offer.

No, not at all. Premium brands discount. The brand I keep holding up as the good example runs one sitewide sale a year, at Black Friday, and it is a proper one. They also do bundle savings, gift with purchase, and a loyalty program with birthday gifts at other times of the year.

So the mechanism isn’t the defining factor. The question is what the offer is for, and the cleanest way to hear it is this: does the offer arrive before the decision, or after it?

A reward arrives after, or alongside. Loyalty points accrue because you already bought. A birthday gift arrives because you’re a participant in the brand’s community. A bundle acknowledges a choice you were already making to invest in the whole system. In none of those cases is the offer doing the heavy lifting of persuasion. The product did that, the offer is the thank you.

Persuasion arrives before, aimed at a decision that hasn’t been made yet. The discount is the argument. And you can tell, because if you removed it the case for buying would collapse. Which is precisely why it has to keep escalating.

Three things follow from that.

The first is that one known sale a year protects your price for the other fifty-one weeks. Constant discounting teaches your customer that your recommended price is fiction and she’s a mug if she pays it. She’s not wrong. She’s just correctly reading what you’ve taught her. Whereas a single predictable event a year does the opposite. Full price stays real, and because the regulars know roughly when it’s coming, the sale itself functions as a reward for loyalty rather than a trap for the undecided.

The second is about the direction of obligation. A gift leaves the customer free and creates goodwill. A discount ladder creates a task. Same effort-transfer point as before, just at the offer layer: one is the house spending, the other is the buyer working.

The third is the caution, because clients will absolutely try to use the mechanism as a loophole. Spend twenty-two dollars more to unlock your free gift is a task wearing a gift’s clothing. Even the good brands do this at Black Friday. So the test isn’t which tactic you’re using. It’s whether it lands as thanks for a decision already made, or as pressure on one that hasn’t been.

And I want to be honest about the other side of this, because I don’t think you should take my ick feeling as a market truth.

Those aggressive sites are making money. Quite a lot of it. That high-persuasion playbook is a perfectly accurate read of a price-led buyer, especially at a low order value, and if that’s genuinely your customer then you should probably run it and stop reading marketing content shared by people like me.

So the question isn’t whether using all those FOMO and scarcity and discount tactics are bad. The question is which model of your customer you’re willing to be right about, and what that model costs you. Because a model that produces the ick caps your repeat rate. And a capped repeat rate means permanent paid acquisition just to stand still, which is the exact machine I pulled apart in last week’s episode.

And if you’ve been inadvertently accepting the high-persuasion bells and whistles model and now realise, as a premium brand you’d rather not, let me share a quick cautionary tale of a past client of ours – a fashion accessory brand who thought of themselves as premium.

We worked with them for some time, trying to shift them away from constant weekly discount offers, but they just could not stop themselves from doing them – it was like a knee-jerk reaction with them. The reality was, they refused to look at their numbers from a net profit perspective, had their head in the sand about how aggressively they were squeezing their existing customer base without investing in winning new customers, and had too much of their self-identity and status and ego tied up in having a huge top-line revenue number. 

They literally had no idea how much their approach was costing, not in cost of goods, not in discounts, and not in terms of a diminishing returning customer base. We had to stop working with them after a while because they kept wanting the profitable premium brand result but without implementing the strategies it would require (or, more precisely, stopping themselves from using those high-pressure tactics that repel the premium buyers they so wanted).

The red carpet

So let’s turn it around, because everything so far has been diagnosis and I’d rather leave you with the constructive version. And I like to call this ‘rolling out the red carpet’.

A red carpet experience is not decoration. It isn’t branded tissue paper or fancy Washi tape. It’s the brand absorbing effort at every point where the customer would otherwise have to spend her own. 

And the useful thing about framing it that way is that you can walk your entire journey and ask one question at every stage:

Who is doing the work here?

First visit. There’s a boutique I love in Adelaide, and their staff do not say “can I help you?” Because think about what that question actually does. It hands the effort straight back to you. You have to work out what you need and then articulate it to a stranger.

They say “who are you shopping for today?” You can answer in two words, and in return you get a curated subset of the shop instead of all of it.

Then they ask whether you have a budget in mind, and the way they phrase this is really clever, because of what they do with the answer. They don’t translate it into price tiers. They translate it into relationship. 

“These are our popular new baby gifts for close family” they’ll say. That sentence lets a customer spend more or less without feeling upsold or underestimated, because the frame is social appropriateness rather than money. She isn’t being sold a higher price. She’s being helped to get the gift right for the occasion, and that’s almost like potentially saving the customer from committing any accidental social faux pas.

Online, that’s shop by recipient, shop by occasion, gift finders, collections built around the relationship rather than the product category. Obviously those examples are for gifting and aren’t relevant for all product categories, but the point is somebody has done the choosing and curating for you.

One warning, because this gets botched constantly. Online it sometimes turns up as a quiz that holds the answers hostage behind an email capture. The boutique asks in order to help you. The moment the question exists to harvest something, your customer feels it, and you’ve reproduced the ick, just perhaps with better manners.

The decision. Same information, opposite posture. “Here’s how to know whether this is right for you” instead of “seventeen thousand women can’t be wrong.” 

This could mean: Shade matching. Sizing guidance. An honest note about who a product isn’t for, which does more for conversion than 5,000 reviews could. You are removing risk rather than applying pressure.

Checkout. Nothing new appears. No interstitial. No upsell. No surprise at the shipping line. Nothing pre-ticked, ever. No need to decline seven different extra offers before you can buy the thing you want. The absence of events is the luxury.

The wait. This is the largest unclaimed space in eCommerce and it is very nearly free.

Most brands treat the gap between payment and delivery as dead air. It’s four to seven days of held attention from a woman who has already paid, is already thinking about and eagerly anticipating receiving your product, and will probably never again be this receptive to hearing from you. Fill it with something that isn’t a sales message. Like who made the thing, or how to get the best result. 

Unboxing. I love this bit. Admittedly, as a kid I was the one who would painstakingly wrap gifts with beautiful paper and ribbons and who learned calligraphy to write fancy place cards for dinner parties.

Rather than treat your packaging as the lowest-cost practical step in your operation where you must cut costs down to the absolute bare minimum, think about the unboxing as a multi-sensory event. You’ve got up to five senses available, so just imagine how immersive the unboxing experience would be for your customers? Sight and touch are the obvious two. 

Sound: the tear, the rustle, the way a lid seats when it’s made properly. Scent is the most underused and the most powerful of the lot. Probably only taste if there’s food involved, but retailers like Adore Beauty became famous for adding a TimTam into each order!

The reason this matters isn’t decorative. Affect arrives before evaluation and then shapes it. A parcel that engages several senses is remembered as a feeling. A parcel that engages none gets assessed as a transaction, and once she’s assessing, you’re being compared on price.

The discipline is one or two senses done properly. Five done cheaply reads as clutter, which is its own kind of signal.

And the box needs to open without a fight, and there needs to be evidence of a human inside. A named person. A line that refers to what she actually bought.

That last bit is the part everyone copies and it’s the least important. Ribbon on top of a week of silence is a costume, not an experience.

First use. The highest-risk moment in the entire journey and the least served. How can you set your customer up for success right from the start? If she gets it wrong first go – she applies too much, she doesn’t prep, she expects the result on day two instead of day thirty – then she writes the review and it’s not likely to be positive. Whereas, teaching her how to get the best result protects your future margin as much as it serves her.

Beyond. Repair it. Refill it. Replace the part. Tell her when she’s due. Be the brand that extends the life of the thing rather than the one that sells her the next one before she’s finished this one. Just show up like a considerate person who legitimately wants to have a relationship with the customer.

I think you can take two things from all of that: 

1. The red carpet is cheapest exactly where it’s least expected. Nobody optimises the wait, or the first use, or the second month. Which is precisely why care shows up so loudly there, and it costs almost nothing.
2. And the test never changes. At every stage, who’s doing the work? If the answer is your customer, it isn’t a red carpet, no matter what the box looks like.

Let me leave you with a simple suggestion that you could do this week: Walk your own shop as a stranger and look for four places where you’ve made her do the work.

The first is your add-to-cart area. How many different options does she need to consider before making a decision? Are you offering 4 different incentives before the add-to-cart button?

The second is the number of decisions between landing and paying. You know what I mean – when you’ve added to cart and then you get offered 3 additional offers, whether it’s adding something to reach a free shipping threshold, or being shown different upsell or cross sell offers before you’re even able to confirm your order.

The third is your discount. Does she have to do a whole bunch of mental arithmetic to figure out the good price? If she does, that’s not a saving, that’s homework. And in the words of Donald Miller of Build a Story Brand fame, if you require a customer to expend too many brain calories just to figure out what you’re selling, the customer will bounce because it’s just too much effort.

The fourth is your review count. Does the number on your homepage match the number on the product page she’s actually looking at? Because if it doesn’t, she’ll clock it, and everything else you’ve claimed gets re-examined. Back to my icky make-up buying experience – before the cart the figure quoted was over 170,000 customers, and afterwards it was under 70,000. That kind of inconsistency is a bit disingenuous.

Now I’ll probably use the mascara. But I doubt I’ll buy from them again. Not because the product’s actually bad, and not because the marketing didn’t work, but because it DID work, and that’s the whole uncomfortable point. Because the entire experience told me what they thought of me, and I didn’t much like it.

Your shop is telling your customer something too. It’s worth knowing what.

If you want a second pair of eyes on what yours is saying, come and book a Brand Growth Strategy Session. It’s forty-five minutes, it’s free, and we’ll go through your actual journey rather than your dashboard. The link’s in the show notes.