Why do people buy online? It's a classic marketing question, because if you can figure out the riddle you can try and create a program that causes people to buy. That it is the main reason marketing exists, you want to cause sales. All the stats about brand awareness, brand recall or brand engagement are merely old and indirect methods to try and quantify the likelihood of purchase and figure out why do people buy?. However, now we can actually measure marketing much more efficiently and can report why people buy online and make a purchasing decision.
They come down to six core reasons:
- Scarcity - We assign greater value to sources that are becoming less available.
- Popularity - If everyone's doing it...
- Social Proof - If you are unsure, what do your friends think?
- Authority - People look to influencers to see if the product is good enough. Can you say Oprah's favorite things?
- Consistency - People tend to choose once and stick with a brand. For example, we always drive a Honda.
- Reciprocity - If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours...if you give me something for free, I may purchase from you later?
If you look at the above stats, there some things that boil down in terms of social commerce. The opinions of your friends will matter in your purchase and once people make a decision, they tend to keep it. So as you market, it's much more important to ensure you use these tactics and get the client and customer as soon as possible. Word of mouth marketing is still popular. It's just called Facebook and Twitter.
Check out the cool infographic below from TabJuice.com for some stats on each reason:
Courtesy of Tab Juice.
Comments
Why do People Buy Online?
John seems to be asking the wrong question, as the article doesn't answer 'Why do People Buy Online?'
I would suggest that people buy online because of convenience, saves time, cost.
Perhaps the question for his article should be 'What makes people buy certain products / services?'
Discuss...
Gil
www.business-website-seo.co.uk
Looking for reasons on eCommerce behaviors
Hey Gil -
I was looking more at reasons why people certain brands online v. other brands. For example people buy crusies online but some brands do better than others. Why? So you are right in that I was looking at that particular facet.
Thanks,
JC
misunderstanding of cause/effect
You can reduce all these to say people buy things that they know are available, useful and they can afford.
If you put ads/suggestions in front of people youve acheived 1 of 3 of those reasons. Now if you can show someone their friends or an expert bought something, or a customer got value out of a similar item from the same brand before , youre making a case for how useful it is.
People arent going to buy anything they dont know is available and dont know is useful. The points you make are generally just examples of how people find things that are useful with a perceived fair value in the modern online environment.
True
I think that's true, but my point here was to show that certain tactics may work. Some of this is just common sense, like limitied availabiltiy. But as you pointed out...knowledge, amplified by networks, can really cause some buying.