eCommerce Customer Service: It's All About Understanding and Harvesting Your Customer's Impulses

We all know that they place chewing gum, candy, and tabloids at the checkout counter in supermarkets, as you may have the impulse to add them to your cart at the spur of the moment.

"Spur of the Moment" - the Best Kind of Spur

Retailers know that a significant proportion of shopping can be driven by the momentary urge. Such an impulse, if left unchecked, can lead a customer to a life of unmanageable debt. But those are extreme cases. Even the most rational person is occasionally driven by the "want" to buy, even when there is no "need" to buy.

Let me tell you about a recent personal experience. I started a walking regimen last month. Naturally, I read up about walking. The way contemporary user-tracking technology works, what with cookies and clickstream tracking, my browser and Google account probably knew that I was inclined towards fitness. So a minute before I started writing this article, I landed at a webpage that advertised a $99 glass that would record information about everything I drink in a day. Curious to know more, I clicked on to find that the electronic glass was probably as beneficial to my walking regimen as the app I had recently downloaded that tracks my walking.

Had it not been for this article on impulsive purchases that I was starting to write, I would probably have ended up impulsively buying the electronic glass.

Extensive research about the power of visual suggestion shows that it triggers an unplanned urge to possess a certain product. And if you combine visual suggestion with a well-crafted promotional message, you have probably sealed the deal.

Cookie Tracking and Clickstream Tracking Provide a Wealth of Information

If a registered user navigates around your website, you can track their clickstream and figure out what product they are likely to impulsively buy. But what about those who do not visit your website at all? Today, there are many ad networks, such as Google Adwords, that track the online behavior of hundreds of millions of users. They use this big data to connect sellers to prospects. The intelligent $99 glass that I mentioned earlier, was presented to me using this technology.

It is no longer about you being a sophisticated data analyst or scientist. Today you can at least partially rely on the data analytics capabilities of the top ad networks to land you the perfect audience.

Impulse Buying Is the Leading Cause of Consumer Remorse

Shortly following the euphoric decision to impulsively buy a product, the consumer could get guilt-ridden, if not debt-ridden. If your ecommerce website has a fair returns policy, then the consumer will be less likely to associate the negativity with your brand. That is why, on the one hand it is important to harness a consumer's impulse buying behavior, on the other it is also important to let him know that your ecommerce website is a safe place to occasionally make impulsive mistakes.

Final Words

Is ecommerce especially prone to impulse purchase? The answer to that is debatable. Probably unplanned purchases are as likely offline as online. But the big difference is that you make an unplanned purchase offline only when you are in a position to buy. For instance, you do not make a purchase when you are at the bus stop or inside the city bus. But online your impulse can be triggered even when you are reading an article about the Second World War. That is what makes impulse buying such a hot topic among ecommerce professionals.

ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.