Online retail 'speed sale' is stressful as hell

Online retail 'speed sale' is stressful as hell: "

Here's a peculiar sales tactic—stress out your customers by giving them just seconds to decide on discounted items, or they lose the price forever. DDB Stockholm designed just such a 'speed sale' for Swedish online retailer Papercut (the same agency-client tandem that brought you the bus-stop ad with the penis). Click through to SpeedSale.se to see it in action. Items fly onto the screen, one after the other. For each one, you have four seconds to decide whether you want to buy it—as insane music pumps up your blood pressure further. If you fail to act, the item is swept away, and the price is gone forever. DDB is under no illusions that anyone will actually enjoy this experience. 'Forget about time-limited offers of the golden days. Welcome to the Papercut Speed Shopping STRESS Hell,' the creative director says in an email to us. Enjoyable or not, the gaming aspect is pretty cool and will surely be a hit among a certain segment. Imagine if Amazon.com did this. It would be a runaway success, if only for the novelty factor.

"