eCommerce and psychology: a different approach to sales in an e-shop

eCommerce topics often talk about sales promotion, e-shop publicity and marketing, pricing, design and comfortability, which are of course crucial elements. However, a topic that is discussed only on rare occasions is the psychological aspects of eCommerce, which have an equally, if not more, significant impact on the consumer’s decision to buy. Therefore, this article attempts to look at eCommerce from a psychological perspective and its application to the establishment and development of an e-shop.

Human behavioural psychologist B.J. Fogg argues that people’s behaviour is determined by three components: motivation, ability and prompts. It is when we focus on all the three aspects that we have the greatest potential to attract customers. Otherwise, we may not get the desired result: motivation may be high, but the customer may not have the financial means to make the purchase, and a strong [prompt (e.g. a large discount) may not work if there is no motivation, even if there are sufficient financial means.

Motivation

Motivation is considered to be the most important, and at the same time the hardest part to trigger. Of course, a customer coming into your store may already be potentially motivated and interested in your products or services, but otherwise you can increase motivation through:

Sensation – the desire to experience pleasure or avoid pain. If you offer something that contributes to the fulfilment of this desire, you increase motivation.
Anticipation – the hope of a good outcome or the fear of a bad outcome. You will increase motivation when you offer something that increases the hope of achieving the desired goal.
Belonging – the desire to be part of a community or not to be rejected by it. If you arouse the desire to be part of a community, you will again increase motivation.

In an e-shop, you can motivate not only to make purchases, but also to perform such actions as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a template, or any other action that is useful to you and will lead to a sale later.

Ability

It’s much easier to create an eCommerce element because you can adjust the attractiveness of your website:

• Time – Nobody wants to spend a lot of time shopping in an e-shop, so ease and simplicity are the keywords you should follow. By the way, the speed of downloading is also important – studies have shown that around half of visitors leave a website if it doesn’t load within seconds. 
• Price – Know how much income your users earn and how sensitive they are to additional costs such as delivery charges.
• Effort – Aim to make it so that shopping requires as few physical actions as possible – button clicks, for example, installing an autofill function, etc.
• Simplicity – Make the shopping experience as routine as possible. Make the customer experience intuitive by using clear text, easily accessible size charts, detailed product information, simple shopping cart and checkout processes.

Prompts

Perhaps the simplest of the three parts of the B.J. Fogg model. Prompt is an action that encourages the purchase of a good or service here and now. A prompt can be a striking e-shop design, an attractive text or a pop-up window with an additional discount. Examples and ideas can be found here.

Important: how to address fears?

Another important psychological aspect of eCommerce is the common fears associated with online shopping. According to a Eurostat survey in 2021, the most common reasons for not buying online are the desire to see the product in person or simply a force of habit – 18%. The second most common reason is the lack of need (14%), followed by security issues (6%).

Therefore, these provisions should be kept in mind when setting up a shop and displaying products (photos, descriptions, and videos), when communicating about your products and services, and when looking for solutions such as free returns if the customer is not satisfied with the product after seeing it in person.

Statistics from website visits, advertising clicks and other channels can help to better understand customer needs. Gender, age, location, favourite pages – all this information can build a fairly complete picture of your customer, which can help you both address the fears and target the elements of the behaviour model.