It's hard to overcome today's upselling strategies
2024-06-29
Have you ever been in a situation where you were looking to buy a new product of some sort and ended up way overspending by getting the most flashed-out variant in the end? Well, if you are somewhat like me that has happened more than once and you have been a victim of so-called upselling strategies. I generously hate these practices and think that there should be more media coverage on them, so that's what we are talking about in this article...
In a nutshell, upselling is the practice of motivating customers to purchase a more expensive product that not only fulfills most of their needs, but all of them or even greatly exceeds them. This usually works by pointing out the (useless) advantages of a higher-end product and/or raising the "demands" of the customer above the initial level via clever product naming, marketing texts and comparison graphs. Another commonly used practice is to make the entry-level product barely usable in order to "keep" the baseline price low, provide overpriced upgrade options that generate a lot of profit and space many of them on top of each other, so that the customer is likely to keep upgrading, since every jump to the next tier looks relatively small in comparison. Don't get me wrong, sometimes customers just have wrong expectations for a product and exposing them to other options is generally a good idea, since they might not have considered the best option for them. But deliberately designing your products with artificial limitations and poor choices to make outrageous profits from upgrades seems evil to me and is nothing I would like to support unless there isn't a good alternative available.
Speaking of evil upselling practices, let's look at Apple's current MacBook lineup as an example - I'll refer to German pricing, but it's equally bad in all the other countries I have researched. You start of with the entry-level M2 MacBook Air for 1199 €, but the M3 is only 100 € more, so you immediately choose that. Then you see that it only comes with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of solid-state storage, which doesn't feel appropriate for such an expensive machine, which is why you double both to 16 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD. But Apple charges an outrageous 230 € for each of these upgrades, which leads to a total price of 1759 € for this ultrabook laptop. But the evil upselling doesn't stop there, now you notice that the Air models don't have a fan leading to throttling under heavy load for an extended period of time and only support one external display (in addition to the internal one). What if you could fix at least the first problem by upgrading to the baseline MacBook Pro, which starts at 1999 € and also provides you with more IO as well as a much better screen? That seems reasonable, so you do it. Sadly, this MacBook Pro only has 8 GB of RAM again, so you need to upgrade that for 230 € as well, which puts you at 2229 € in total. Of course, you can keep upgrading to the M3 Pro MacBook Pro for 2499 € and further, but I think you get the point that you have almost doubled the price by following "reasonable" upgrades that each make sense on their own, but are carefully designed to make you overspend.
Sure, you also get a much better machine with the 16 GB M3 MacBook Pro and even more so with the M3 Pro MacBook Pro, but if you only need a machine for light everyday usage and office work, you won't get twice the value out of this higher-end model to justify the almost doubled price. Don't be fooled, this isn't a coincidence, the lineup is specifically designed to generate these results and Apple will keep doing it, because it simply works. But luckily, you aren't helpless against these evil practices. The most effective thing to do is obviously to boycott companies using these practices, but that can be somewhere between hard and impossible depending on your requirements. However, what you can always do before buying is to go back to your initial demands and check whether your choice is utterly overkill - you will be surprised at how often this saves you a lot of money. Generally, try to make a requirements list including potential niceties and a certain amount of "future-proofing" headroom beforehand based on neutral reviews or even better consumer reports and stop thinking about upgrades once this list is satisfied. Sure, doing such a write-up and the necessary research takes a bit of time, but it is well worth it in my experience and can save quite a bit of money
With that said, what are your experiences with upselling and overspending, what measures have you taken and how successful were they? As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...