E-commerce platforms prominently advertise low levels of inventory (“only three units left”) for 'long tail' goods in physical or digital formats. Thus, they wish to trigger consumer perceptions of scarcity and ultimately promote sales. In this paper, we develop a model on how in scarcity messages, the inventory level affects the online sales goods. We test the model against evidence from e-commerce sales data of about 35,000 printed books. We find that for e-commerce sales, lower inventory promotes sales late but inhibits purchases in the early stages of the purchase process. We reflect this counterintuitive finding against propositions grounded in different theoretical bodies. Thereupon, we summarize our research contributions and provide some implications for research and practice. We conclude with identified study limitations and suggestions for future research.

电子商务平台显着地宣传以物理或数字格式存储“低尾巴”商品的低水平库存（“仅剩三个单位”）。因此，他们希望激发消费者对稀缺性的认识并最终促进销售。在本文中，我们开发了一个模型，该模型关于在稀缺消息中库存水平如何影响在线销售商品。我们根据电子商务销售数据中约35,000册印刷书籍的证据对模型进行了测试。我们发现，对于电子商务销售而言，较低的库存量会在后期促进销售，但会在购买过程的早期抑制购买。我们将这一反直觉的发现与基于不同理论主体的命题进行了对比。因此，我们总结了我们的研究成果，并为研究和实践提供了一些启示。