How do online stores convince you to buy products that you really don't need? Sarry Collins exposes the secrets of the online retail industry
We’re all wise to the tricks that bricks-and-mortar stores use to tempt us to buy. Wafting the smell of freshly baked bread through the supermarket, knocking a penny off prices to make them appear a pound cheaper than they really are, and using bright lighting to make goods seem fresh and inviting. Less familiar, however, are the subtle - and sometimes not-so-subtle - techniques that are now used online to make us part with our credit card details.
Online stores deploy all manner of psychological triggers to ensure that you don’t leave the site without putting a couple of items in your basket - the items that they want you to buy, that is, which might not necessarily be what you set out to purchase in the first place. The placement of buttons, the carefully selected reviews from fellow customers, the product photos, the colours of the action buttons and even the design of the “checkout” itself have all been tailored and tested to maximise the site’s conversion rate - the proportion of site visitors who are “converted” into paying customers.
If you want to avoid being swayed by such tactics, you need to learn what to look for when browsing online stores. We’ve spoken to experts in online psychology and retail design to expose the methods used by leading online sellers. We’ve surveyed the sites of household names such as Amazon, Asos and EasyJet, to show you exactly how you’re steered towards making a purchase. And we also reveal how to get your own back, by taking advantage of the retailers to get a better deal for yourself.
SOCIAL PROOF
Human beings are hugely affected by the opinions of their peers. As psychologist Graham Jones, author of Clickology: What Works in Online Shopping and How Your Business can use Consumer Psychology to Succeed, explained to PC Pro: “Part of the social glue that holds us together is that we like the things our friends like - it’s the fuel that keeps the group going. It’s a way of social groups reducing conflict.”
What this means in practice is that if we feel even a vague affinity with someone, we can’t help placing a value on their preferences and decisions - even if we’ve never met them, or have zero proof that they actually exist. It is precisely this that Amazon and other retailers are banking on when they cram their homepage and product pages with boxes claiming “people like you also bought this”. According to Jones, “they’re using the psychology of‘social proof to get you to buy things that, actually, you may not even have considered buying. Now your brain is saying ‘well, I ought to have it, because people like me have if.”
The degree to which retailers personalise their recommendations varies, but the pull is more powerful the more you feel you have in common with fellow purchasers. Stores may harvest personal data supplied at registration, along with your buying history, to highlight reviews from those with similar traits. You may even be offered discounts for filling out surveys, to give stores yet richer information on which to base their recommendations.
“It isn’t only about having user reviews on there, but providing a point of identification,” said Emma Travis, a strategist at retail conversion-optimisation specialist PRWD. “If you could include the gender, the age, and the interests of the person doing the review, for example, that will help someone visiting your website to say ‘if it’s suitable for them, it’s suitable for me’.”
Sometimes sites combine social proof with another very powerful trick - appealing to people’s egos. “Linkedln does this very well,” said Nathalie Nahai, a digital strategist and author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. “They might put up ‘20 things every exceptional boss should know’. Then they’ll use a lead saying ‘good bosses do XYZ, exceptional bosses do more’. You’ve already bought into the idea of being a good boss, and of course you want to be exceptional, so you have to read on, and end up being sold to.”
The ultimate endorsement comes from those you know personally. For example, Google uses the homepage of the Play store to promote items that have been rated by your contacts, even going so far as to show you their photo alongside an image of the product itself. The store also encourages you to “follow” others in your social circles to “learn from people in the know”, increasing the authority and trust you place in the store itself.
This tactic might seem less manipulative than other methods of online selling, since you’re being shown the genuine opinions of your friends. But don’t for a second think that the items in question have been highlighted purely because they’re popular. “They’ll be selective in what they’re pushing, ” warned Jones. “The retailer will be choosing the items that are the most profitable for them to sell to you.”
At the opposite extreme, even the endorsements of entirely anonymous customers can encourage us to buy. Travis said that sites can see a huge upswing in sales simply by promoting a USP such as “nine out of ten of our customers” rate a product highly. “We’ve run an experiment with one of our clients, where they put a USP bar on their homepage with social proof in it,” she told us. “It actually increased the key conversion rate by 20%.”
What about negative reviews? You might think that the presence of the odd one-star review proves that you’re not being steered in a particular direction - but that’s exactly what the retailers want you to think. “Having negative reviews is actually likely to increase trust, because it says ‘we’re not perfect’,” Travis pointed out. If the negative review includes a response, that’s a further feather in their cap, because it shows the customer that the site cares about complaints.
PRICING TACTICS
Online retail is a highly price-sensitive business. Amazon has spiders constantly crawling other websites to check prices, and might change its own prices several times a day if better deals are detected elsewhere. However, setting prices isn’t merely about undercutting the competition: there are some crafty psychological tricks that can be deployed here too.
Most buyers have become wise to the age-old practice of knocking a penny off a round number, to make us perceive the price as lower. But taking off a few more pence can be enough to give this trick a second wind. “Online, you’ll see lots of prices ending in seven,” said Jones. “When you sell at £9.99, you don’t sell quite as many as you do at £9.97. It appears that the extra couple of pence makes people think it’s cheaper.”
This isn’t the only exploitable trick our brains play on us. “There’s evidence to suggest that the longer it takes to say the words in the price, the more expensive we think it is,” revealed Jones. “On television, those adverts for the latest sales at DFS won’t say this is ‘six-hundred and ninety-nine pounds’ - they’ll say this is ‘six-nine-nine’. Retailers will all be looking for ways to reduce the number of syllables in a price, because when we read it, we hear it in our heads. We need to ‘hear’ those prices in as short a time as possible.”
The same principle can be used to put a more effective spin on sale offers, according to Nahai. Our brain processes numbers more quickly than it does words, so websites will generally do best when advertising goods as “50% off” rather than “half price”, “two for the price of one” or “buy one get one free”. It simply takes our brain longer to process the words - and, as we all know, the internet reduces our attention span to that of a toddler in a toy shop.
Even the ordering of the numbers in a price can affect our perception of value, according to Jones. Numbers presented in descending order appear cheaper than those that ascend. “If you have something at £567, we perceive that as considerably more expensive than £543,” said Jones, even though the proportional difference is small.
Tricks such as this can be used in a targeted way to push us towards choosing certain products. Given the choice between, say, two televisions on a website, most people will gravitate towards the cheapest. But if three options are presented “the one you actually want people 1 buy ends up as the middle option,” observed Travis. It works for the same reason that an inexperienced wine buyer might choose an £8 bottle of plonk: they don’t want to pay for the most expensive option, but they don’t want to take a gamble on the cheapest either. By choosing which products to offer, the retailer can calibrate visitors’ perceptions of value and steer them in the desired direction.
While all of these tactics take advantage of broad psychological tendencies, retailers also use experimental methods to find out the specifics of what pushes our buttons. For services such as online storage or software, where you might get “basic”, “pro” or “enterprise” accounts, the differences between tiers are often presented in the form of a ticklist of features. Sites may experiment with different variations of the offer, to work out which features customers are most willing to pay for. Travis revealed how one client tested eight variations of a feature table on its site, and found that the winning variant produced an 185% uplift in conversions. “There was no way we could have worked out through psychology alone which of those benefits would have triggered those customers,” she said. “But through testing, through actually laying those things out in a table, we were able to see which one tipped them over.”
SCARCITY SCARE TACTICS
If you’ve seen the “Black Friday” footage of grown adults scrapping in supermarkets to get their hands on the last of the cheap televisions, you’ll appreciate that scarcity is a powerful trigger - and it’s one that online retailers routinely exploit.
The little “only six left in stock” label Amazon often puts on items, or the “Hurry! Only four seats left at this price” alerts that pop up over EasyJet flight options, are designed to stimulate one of our base human instincts. “It taps into a fairly basic survival instinct in our brain,” says Graham Jones. “If we go back through our evolution, we were much more interested in food when it was scarce than when it was plentiful. People don’t like scarcity. They fear they’re going to miss out.”
Budget airlines play on this fear particularly aggressively: they tell you not only how few seats are available at a given price, but also how many other customers are searching for that flight at the same time (the truthfulness of those figures only they know, of course). Some even use cookies to put the price up should you return to search for the same flight a day later. In this way, even if they don’t get your custom this time, they train you not to delay the next time you come looking for cheap flights.
Legally, online retailers aren’t allowed to lie to customers about the remaining stock of a particular item, but there are ways to get around the rules: “Only five left at this price” is a common tactic, before the item is then instantly restocked at a marginally different price. Voucher codes for certain products that end on a specific date are another means of creating artificial scarcity: nobody wants to miss out on a bargain.
SITE LAYOUT & COLOURS
The psychology of online retail doesn’t rely solely on deep-seated emotional triggers. It can also employ much more straightforward tactics, such as simply laying out the site in a way that encourages engagement. Jones explained that, just as you know that baked beans are in the second aisle of your local branch of Tesco, online shoppers expect the layout of a retail website to be instantly familiar. “Most people do most of their shopping with II the big retailers: Amazon, Tesco and f so forth,” he said. “All of those big online retailers will have their shopping cart’s checkout button at the top right, and their search bar in the top middle. If you’re a retailer that doesn’t have your shopping cart on the top right, or your search bar top middle, then people won’t know how to use your website. Many retailers lose out on sales because they’re not doing what the big companies do.”
That particular template hasn’t become dominant by chance. “Here [in the Western world], where we read left to right, our brain sees the left-hand side as the past and the right-hand side as the future,” explained Jones. “So if you want people to buy something, you’re better off putting your ‘Buy Now’ button on the right-hand side of the page.”
Believe it or not, the colour of that button is also critical. Jones cited research showing that red “Buy Now” buttons achieve better clickthrough rates than other colours, especially on sites targeted at men. “The reason is that red is a potent sexual signal,” he claims, pointing to examples such as red lipstick and, further down the evolutionary chain, baboons’ backsides. “Men are wired to be interested in things that are red. ” Red is less of a turn-on for women, which is why sites that appeal to a mixed audience (such as Amazon and Asos) use a more neutral orange colour for their buying buttons. It still has that reddish hue to appeal to the male shoppers, without putting off women.
Jones noted that many retailers make the mistake of using green buying buttons, because of the colour’s association with “Go”. Independently, though, two of our experts cited research indicating that green “Buy Now” buttons are less effective than red ones. “You can be quite relaxed about whether or not you obey the green traffic light,” reasoned Jones. “You can’t be relaxed about obeying the red one.”
When it comes to more general use of colour, it seems there’s no solid research establishing whether (for example) a blue site will in general perform better than a white one. However, there are certain colours that come preloaded with connotations - such as EasyJet’s cleverly chosen orange branding. “In most western European countries, the colour orange is associated with cheapness,” said Nahai, “and in the Netherlands, it’s the national colour, so orange is seen as very positive.”
THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
On the high street, shopping is a tactile experience: we brush our fingers over clothing, pick up objects and flick through books. Online shopping obviously lacks that first-hand dimension, so the most successful online stores bend over backwards to make shoppers feel as close to the products as possible. Amazon’s Look Inside feature, for example, replicates that real-world experience of flicking through a paperback in a bookshop, checking out the size of the print and taking in whatever odd phrases and illustrations may catch the eye.
One of the most successful ways of simulating real-world shopping is by providing lots of high-resolution photos for would-be customers to pore over, so that they can zoom in and see the weave of that fabric, the texture on the laptop lid, or the grain on that coffee table.
“Product photography is about engaging the customer, replicating the product as if it were in their hands,” said Emma Travis. “One of our clients, Schuh, is particularly good at this. They take about eight photos per shoe, including the sole. This may sound silly, but it’s something that comes up quite a lot - people want to know the tread of a shoe, if it has good grip, whether it’s coloured. That kind of stuff really does help.”
Asos’s sales shot up by 20% after it introduced catwalk videos of models wearing garments, according to Nahai, because “people could imagine how it would look on themselves”. The Fits.me software - used by sites such as T M Lewin, Thomas Pink and Austin Reed - goes further, allowing shoppers to enter their vital statistics and see exactly how a selected garment would fit them. The software removes the inconvenience and potential embarrassment of going to the shop to try stuff on - and the company claims it’s cut size-related returns by 77%.
SEALING THE DEAL
Even after a retailer has persuaded you to fill up your shopping basket, the battle isn’t won. The Baymard Institute, which provides analytics for e-commerce sites, claims that almost seven out of ten items added to an online basket are never paid for. Retailers therefore need to do everything they can to get you to complete your purchase.
One way in which they do this is to borrow a trick from theme parks. Just as Disneyland doesn’t let you see the full length of the queue for a ride, the sharper online stores break up their checkout procedures into four or five shorter sections, so that you aren’t put off by a lengthy looking form to fill in. Travis labels this the “momentum effect”. “It creates the illusion of progress, because people feel like they’re getting somewhere, that they’ve finished one page and are moving on to the next,” she explained. Between them, those four or five pages might have exactly the same number of fields to fill in as a site with one long page, but because the next ten questions are hidden, you aren’t discouraged by seeing how far you are from the end of the process.
Another way online stores seek to minimise abandoned purchases is through constant reassurance as the customer makes their way through the checkout process. A progress bar telling a customer they have reached, say, stage three of five gives them a sense of achievement, almost turning the checkout into a mini-game that the customer wants to complete.
“Another thing we’ve found to be very effective at increasing completion rates is, each time someone fills in a field - say their name, address or whatever - you add a green tick once they’ve finished it,” said Nahai. “That’s a very simple, subtle hack that gives people a sense of being rewarded.”
It seems you really are very easy to please. And now you’ve completed this feature. Well done.