Pensa

See how other shops sell: Pensa names the selling techniques on each page and which to copy. Runs on your device; sharing is opt-in.

Pensa is a competitor research tool that runs while you browse. Visit the shops you compete with, and the ones you admire, and Pensa names every selling technique each page uses. Examples countdown timers, "only 3 left" messages, crossed-out reference prices, free-shipping thresholds, decoy pricing tiers, fees that appear only at checkout. It shows you each shop's own wording and the numbers behind it, so you can see exactly how they sell. These tricks are rooted in behavioral economics psychology, and they are exactly why your competitors are doing so well. Pensa helps you understand and copy these tricks. It is built for founders, marketers, growth and CRO people, and agencies who build online stores: anyone who wants to know what other shops are doing right now, without screenshotting pages and guessing. HOW IT WORKS • The toolbar icon counts the techniques on the page in front of you. • Click it to see each one, with the shop's own wording and the specifics: "Crossed out $52, 1.5 times the $35 price." "Only 1 left at one nearby store, Polaris: scoped to a single store." • Standouts get a card. When a shop uses a technique at full strength (a crossed-out price at 1.5 times the real one or more, a stock count of 3 or fewer, a live clock counting down, a pop-up naming a recent buyer), a small card points it out as soon as it is on screen. You can switch cards to standouts plus every add to cart, or off, in Settings. • Every technique comes with how shops build it and what to note when you study one: the size of the gap, what a stock claim is scoped to, where a threshold sits. • Once a week, "What Pensa saw this week" collects your research: which techniques were most widespread, on which shops, with real examples and the standouts first. Copy it as text for your team. It never blocks, hides or changes anything on a page. WHAT IT NOTICES On the page in front of you: • Reference prices: a higher crossed-out price next to the real one • Charm pricing: prices that stop just short of a round number • Limited-stock messages • Countdown timers • Live activity notices: "23 people are viewing this" • Preselected options: warranties, add-ons, marketing opt-ins • Loaded decline wording: "No thanks, I don't want to save money" • Spend thresholds: "You're $12 away from free shipping" • Unequal button emphasis: one choice made far louder than the other • Decoy options: a third option that exists to make a second one look better • Repeated interruptions • Savings framing: the same discount shown as whichever number looks bigger • Exit-intent offers: something that appears as you move to leave By comparing one page to the next: • Fees added later: charges that were not in the first price you saw • Unrequested cart items: add-ons in the cart that were never chosen By comparing today to what the same site showed you before: • Timers that reset on each visit • Stock counts that go up as well as down • "Was" prices that have never been the actual price • Viewer counts that repeat or never vary The last four say nothing on a first visit, by construction. They are claims about change over time, and there is nothing to compare against until you have seen the same item twice. HOW IT DESCRIBES A SHOP It reports what a page displayed, never whether it was true. A limited-stock message may be perfectly accurate, and Pensa makes no claim about any retailer's intent. Whether to try a technique on your own store is your call. PRIVACY AND PERMISSIONS Your browser will tell you Pensa can read the websites you visit, and that is accurate: it needs to, because these techniques turn up on small and new shops as often as on big ones, and no list of sites would cover them. What it does with that access is narrow: • It reads a page and decides whether it is a shop first. On anything else (email, news, documents, chat) it stops, records nothing, and stays out of the way. • It never runs on banking, health, government or webmail sites. • There is no account, and no advertising or analytics company is involved at any point. • Out of the box it makes no network requests at all. You can check: open DevTools, go to the Network tab, and browse. Everything it notices stays on your device, and the weekly report is built there too. Detections are deleted after 30 days by default, and you can change that in Settings; the product history that lets it spot a countdown that resets or a "was" price that is never charged is kept up to 90 days. You can export or erase all of it at any time. OPTIONAL: HELP MEASURE THESE TECHNIQUES One setting, off by default and not pre-ticked, shares which shops use which techniques, and whether people added the item to their cart after seeing them, so their prevalence can be researched. It is a high schooler's research project. Pensa asks once, on the page that opens when you install it, with two equally weighted answers and nothing preselected. It does name the shop: a report says "someone saw a countdown on shein.com today." On product pages it also says whether Add to Cart (or Reserve, on travel and ticket sites) was clicked. It never sends the page, the product, your searches, page text, prices, your account, anything that identifies you, or any time more precise than the day. Reports go out in batches, not at the moment something is found, and you can read the exact reports waiting to be sent before any of them are. Turning it off deletes anything not yet sent. CONTROLS Every technique in the list above has its own switch. Turn off anything you do not need for your research. Switching one off stops it being recorded at all, so it also leaves the toolbar count, the cards and the report. Cards can be set to standouts only, standouts plus every add to cart, at most one per shop, or none. The weekly report can stop opening on its own. OPEN SOURCE The full source, including the list of excluded sites and the exact rules for what counts as a standout, is public: https://github.com/viditChhajed/pensa