Selling goods on e-commerce platforms: The impact of scarcity messages

•The impact of scarcity messages depends on the stage of the purchase process.•Early in the purchase process, scarcity messages decrease sales.•Late in the purchase process, scarcity messages increase sales.•Prospect theory best explains the impact of scarcity messages on sales. 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.