Psychology of Online Shopping

Online shopping has revolved the commerce and has impacted in various ways people buy goods and services, it has made shopping easier convenient, and more accessible than it was ever before.

With the advancement of technology in the e–commerce, sellers especially retailers are more aware of the use of behavioral psychological techniques that have greatly affected consumer behavior and help retailers to develop a pipeline to generate new leads and retain the older ones. This article explores the different ways of using these psychological techniques by the business to hunt customers and drive customer behavior to their advantage.

Psychological Techniques that drive online shopping

1.     Instant gratification:

This is one the most used technique by the retailer to generate new leads, retailer use the sense of urgency by putting on limited offers on items they sell, to mitigate the effect of urgency retailers provide their solution by offering online store accessibility, unlike brick and mortar ( physical store) online stores enables the customers to quickly access and buy the item of their preference on very few clicks of their gadget, the sense of pleasure they get by buying things conveniently provide the customer instant gratification

2.     Power of social proof:

The second most influencing tool is the power of social proof, this concept refers to the behavior of people to fall in line with a social group by conforming to the actions of people of that group, business take this tool to generate online sales from their target audience through reviews, ratings or social media post by the most influencing personality of that particular ethnicity, geography or social group. These reviews and ratings help the retailers to endorse the customers by creating a sense of trust reliability and credibility which results in generating sales.

3.     Scarcity and FOMO:

Scarcity and FOMO (fear of missing out), through this concept, sellers create a sense of urgency which encourage the customers to respond quickly. Sellers developed some of the stimuli to drive this behavior through flash sales, countdown timers, and limited time offers ‘creating a sense of scarcity that generate the customer’s response to act quickly, taking advantage of this, sellers use showcasing the number of responses by the people who already purchase the items as a catalase, or make the customer realized of limited availability of the stock.

4.     Power of personalization:

The power of personalization refers to the techniques that online retailers use by utilizing algorithms and data analysis to understand customer behavior and buying decisions, computerized systems recommend the most preferred product to the customers. It makes sense to the audience that the sellers understand their needs and preferences of what they want to purchase.

While keeping the legal issue of using data of customers for the recommendation of products is one of the prime topics to be discussed.

5.     Gamification:

The final concept of our discussion is gamification, this concept cites to make shopping a fun and engaging experience for the buyers, gamification uses the elements of games like a collection of points on buying items of a specific amount, earning badges and rewards on purchase of a quantity of items. This creates a sense of excitement for the buyers and engages them in buying more of the products from online stores.

It is concluded that the psychology of online shopping is very puzzling and complex with multifaceted consequences. That is why retailers always have to be very attentive in choosing a proper strategy to work with as there are also many ethical concerns about the data privacy of the consumers and data protections, so businesses always have to make informed decisions.