Despite the popularity of online shopping, if there’s one thing brick and mortar stores do well, it’s encourage impulse purchasing. Shoppers are lured into buying drinks, snacks, and magazines as they wait in line to pay. Amazingly, every year U.S. consumers spend up to $5,400 on impulse purchases. Fox Business reports that 8 of 10 impulse buys are made at brick-and-mortar. Unfortunately, impulse purchasing doesn’t quite translate the same way to the online environment. Shoppers generally find what they want, add it to their cart, pay, and leave.
Online businesses can’t take advantage of the same triggers (seeing, touching) to encourage impulse buying so they need to get creative. One way is to focus on creating positive customer experiences that allow for making product suggestions and encouraging upsells. By making your online store attractive and easy to navigate you’ll get repeat visits which creates loyalty, trust and leads to impulse purchases. Here are six ways to encourage purchases in the online checkout experience.
- Use impulse purchases to offset the cost of free shipping – Have a minimum purchase amount in order to qualify for free shipping. Along the checkout, encourage them to add items to their cart in order to reach the threshold for free shipping. These extra purchases don’t feel like impulse buys, but rather just a way to get free shipping.
- Use lower-priced items to ask for an upsell – just as in brick-and-mortar stores where lower-priced items such as drinks and snacks are offered in the checkout line, online stores can offer a page of upsells to the checkout process. There can even be a timer connected to the checkout experience (e.g., order within the next 10 minutes and get a special discount or extra product)
- Get extra traffic through social media – Pinterest, Instagram, and many other social media sites now allow e-commerce sites to have their products tagged within the social media platform for instant purchasing. Users don’t have to search multiple sites to find your products and users can purchase as soon as they see something they like all while browsing their favorite social media feed.
- Guide customer purchases with product suggestions – Need a dustpan with that broom or batteries with that new headlamp? The idea is to offer product combinations at the bottom of the page that go with the main product the customer is purchasing. Amazon does this very well with their “frequently bought together” offers at the bottom of the page before checkout.
- Use the need to fit in to drive purchases – when customers see what other people are buying, they want to have it too. By telling shoppers which products have been bought recently, they are more likely to buy those products based on social approval.
- Periodically promote special discount offers – The goal here is to get more people to your site when sales are slow. Special discounts can be used to encourage shoppers to buy more per visit. One strategy is to offer special discounts around certain holidays or other events. Advertise the special offer through social media or an email newsletter.
Impulse buying can be facilitated by getting to know your customers through surveys, questions on social media, and looking at the types of products they buy. It’s then easier to make suggestions to create positive customer experiences which drive impulse purchases.
