I bought a new product a couple of days ago that has been promoted by a few people this week - Site Stealer. (Here's the full Site Stealer review.)

The book is basically about resell rights - buying resell rights to existing products & websites ("stealing" these products & sites). As such, after you purchase the basic Site Stealer product there's a one-time-offer (OTO) for resell rights to Site Stealer itself.

Nothing unusual here, really. Lots of products have done this before.

The OTO page has the usual automated countdown timer, in this case giving you 20 minutes to buy the resale rights. I didn't wait on the page for 20 minutes to find out, but presumably the offer won't be available after that.

It even warns you at the bottom of the page:

This Offer Will NEVER Be Repeated Again So Secure Your License Now While You Can…

Well, I decided against buying resale rights to a product I hadn't reviewed yet (after all, why would you want resale rights if the product turns out to be bad? There was no mention of a money-back guarantee on the resale rights, just the product itself.)

I clicked away from the page and didn't really think about it again.

There's a buyers' autoresponder series for following up after purchase (always a good idea) and lo and behold, today's message is telling me this is my last chance to buy resell rights.

Wait a minute. I thought I had already had my last chance on the OTO page?

Let's look at that quote from the OTO page again:

This Offer Will NEVER Be Repeated Again So Secure Your License Now While You Can…

Well, I suppose that's true. The email that came today is offering the resell rights for considerably less than they were on the OTO page ($97 vs $177). I imagine if I had bought them from the OTO page, I would have been moved to a different autoresponder and never would have seen the email offer.

Now, this happens all the time in direct marketing. It's not just this product or even just the internet marketing world that does it.

The difference between doing it through snail mail and doing it on the internet is the chance that one of your customers is going to connect the dots and see "behind the curtain". Because things on the internet tend to be more transparent, there's a bigger chance of someone catching you, like happened here.

Even those countdown timers are just a way to pressure people into buying. All I had to do to reset the timer was clear the cookies for that website.

No more cookies, suddenly the resell rights offer is available for another 20 minutes.

Now, I'm not getting down on these timers and other ways of pushing people to buy. Maybe they've tested with and without the timer and the conversion is better with it.

But the next time I get a sale pitch for a product from the same person, I'm going to look at everything with a doubtful eye.

If resell rights are offered with a deadline or a limited offer, should I wait? Will I get it at a better price later?

Or should I buy it in case he's telling the truth this time?

I'll be confused whether I should buy to be safe or wait to save money.

And that confusion might just make me decide to forget the whole thing and find an alternative that's more cut-and-dried.

What about you? Do these sales techniques erode your trust in someone? Or do you just take them as par for the course?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think…