The Effects of Scarcity on Engagement: Analyzing Review Volume in Beauty E-Commerce

This study examines the relationship between three scarcity marketing strategies (limited edition, store exclusive, and online only) and consumer engagement, as measured by the number of reviews, in the beauty e-commerce sector. While research shows that scarcity can boost immediate purchases and willingness to pay, it does not necessarily lead to more post-purchase behaviors like writing reviews. Findings from Sephora data show that products employing scarcity strategies receive significantly fewer reviews than regular products. Among the scarcity categories, Sephora-exclusive products received the highest number of reviews, followed by online-only and limited-edition products, suggesting different scarcity strategies lead to different engagement outcomes. Random Forest was the best-performing model even though its predictive power was moderate (R2 ≈ 0.44). XGBoost closely followed (R2 ≈ 0.43). Feature importance analysis revealed that the number of product variations was the most influential factor in predicting review count, while scarcity categories also appeared among top features. Theoretically, this study demonstrates that scarcity marketing strategies are associated with a lower review count, and this effect depends on the specific type of scarcity. Brands should reconsider employing scarcity marketing if their goal is to garner a large number of reviews, and instead consider broadening product variations and leveraging machine learning to inform data-driven decisions. Some limitations of this study include relying on data from just one retailer, oversimplifying scarcity categories, and not having access to social media, time-series, or user data. These areas offer valuable opportunities for future research.