Countdown timers, "only a few left" banners, and phrases like "today only" show up across nearly every online store, and they are not always dishonest signals. Genuine time-limited offers do exist, including clearance stock, seasonal promotions, and true flash events with real deadlines, but interface tricks designed purely to rush a decision are common enough that it pays to look twice before checkout. Learning to tell the two apart usually takes only a few extra seconds of attention.
A legitimate limited-time offer is usually tied to something concrete: a specific calendar event, an end date that appears consistently across the site, or a quantity that is genuinely finite, such as a batch of discontinued stock. If the same countdown timer resets after it hits zero, or the "sale" reappears the following week at an identical price, the deadline was never real to begin with.
Manufactured urgency tends to rely on vague, repeatable language rather than specifics, and it tends to appear regardless of how a shopper arrived at the page, including on products that were never part of any promotional calendar.
The most effective response to urgency messaging is to slow down rather than speed up. Closing the tab, checking a price history if one is available, and returning a day later costs almost nothing for a non-perishable purchase, and a genuinely time-limited offer that expires in that window was probably not going to change the outcome either way. Retailers running honest promotions rarely lose much from a shopper taking an extra day to decide, which is itself a useful signal about which kind of offer is on the page.