What they wanted all along

A man in Kuwait City makes small glass terrariums and sells them through a large online marketplace and through his own modest website. The marketplace takes a generous cut. He would much rather people ordered from him directly.

His first instinct is to tell them so. A note in every parcel explains the fees and asks customers to support a small business by ordering direct next time. A few kind people do. Most do not, and it is not because they are unkind. They came for a pretty jar of greenery at their door by tomorrow, and his margins were never their problem.

There are two ways to get people to do something. One is to make them want what you want. That is slow, expensive and rarely works on anyone who did not half want it already. The other is to look closely at what they have wanted from the start, and find a route to it that also happens to get you what you need.

His customers want the thing to stay alive. Most of them have killed a plant before. So the note changes. Order from the website, and a message arrives a week later with care advice for that exact terrarium, and he answers personally if anything starts to turn brown. The marketplace cannot offer that. He can.

Now ordering direct is not a favour to him. It is simply the better way to get what the customer came for.

From the outside the two approaches look similar. They are not the same job. One asks people to adopt your goal. The other takes theirs seriously and builds the path through it, and that is the one that usually works.