This is part two of a series covering the Amazon market and how massage chairs have been affected there. We will be covering how the massage chair market has been affected through false advertising. If you haven’t already, please do check out the first part of the series before reading ahead. Thank you!
Welcome back to the A Closer Look: series covering how the massage chair market has been affected on Amazon, and well, this part is going to cover how the large influx of chairs have become a problem, not only for the other chair brands but also that their false advertisements towards consumers have become something of an issue.
In order to talk about this, we first need to talk about advertising on Amazon. Most people might not know of it, but consumers are constantly being subject to ads everywhere on Amazon. Let us revisit the product page from the first part.
What is a product page you might be asking? Well, it’s the website page that displays the product as well as product descriptions, reviews, and other listings.
On a product page, there are tons of ads that appear along with products. It advertises by displaying other similar products, which have been paid for in order to recommend them to viewers; there are banners and other products being displayed, which show their star rating (how well a product is favored among customers based on reviews), and their product titles. In terms of advertising, this is the general gist of how sellers get consumers to click on their products, and drive interest towards it.
This is how people effectively attract customers through advertising; many products will display features or appeal more attractive to viewers to grab their attention. But this part of the series wants to inform and highlight how these “new” massage chairs that were recently being dumped into the market are not quite what they seem to be. We don’t want to accuse; however, we can only question the integrity these chairs have.
We had been browsing said chairs on the market, and we quickly realized that many of them were too good to be true. For starters, many of the chairs were heavily underpriced for what they were “featuring” within the chairs. With most of these chairs averaging between $800 to $1500, the features promised in the chair were only found in chairs on average of $3000+.
Of course, you could argue that technology was improving, and that these chairs were the products of high quality technology at lower costs. However, if you were to ask any massage chair manufacturer and distributor, most could tell you why 3D technology wouldn’t be found on a chair lower than $2000—it isn’t practical for a recent technological advance in massage chairs to drastically lower in cost.
Let’s take a step back for a moment, and talk about 3D technology. It utilizes pumps on the back rollers to be able to push rollers deeper into muscles, which is a great quality improvement in terms of robotic massages. It’s considered to be revolutionary due to its human-like massages, which appeals to why someone might choose to purchase a massage chair over going to an actual masseuse. This distinction is why more moderately priced chairs might have 3D technology. And with this improvement comes a higher cost of producing 3D massage chairs. So when a cheap massage chair features in its title or description that it contains an expensive feature, we doubt that it actually does have all its bells and whistles because a product would be trying to make a profit for the company, not a deficit.
Now that we’ve covered what 3D technology is, we can now see why it’s a bit suspicious that a cheap $1000 massage chair could offer something very similar to a moderately $3000 massage chair, and comfortably make a profit off of it. So in our expert opinions, these chairs are not what they seem to be, and are using expensive features that their chair probably doesn’t have in order to entice viewers to purchase one. However, despite the negative implications of the chair, everyone loves the idea of having more for less.
These cheap massage chairs seem to be promising more than it can offer in more ways than one. And to build off of that, our third part of the series will cover another aspect of these chairs which seems off putting compared to other established brands: reviews. But none of this can be proven by us, only supported with what is out there in the market, and through careful analysis. These are, of course, our own opinions, but having been a part of the massage chair market for a long time, we’d like to put in our two cents.
And to emphasize if it has not been clear, if you are potentially in the market of buying a massage chair, go and do the research for yourself, and develop your own opinion. You could potentially come to the same conclusion or not, but our third part of the A Closer Look: series will cover what the reviews say about the chairs, and how they aren’t quite what they seem to be. Until then, goodbye!
Thank you for taking the time to read this! Let us know if you want more of this down in the comments below, or discuss your thoughts and opinions about this topic.