Online recommendations
Online shops are extremely clever. They’re very good at targeting their customers, and a lot of big online retailers are now capitalizing on the idea of creating ‘customized browsing experiences’ which display more ‘relevant’ products and services to their customers.
Just take look at Amazon.
Visit their site and you’ll be greeted with thousands of unique product recommendations based on your buying history, what items you have in your cart, and what items you’ve liked and rated – and they’ve successfully integrated these customized browsing experiences throughout the entire site, from homepage to checkout.
Online reviews = greater trust
Nobody wants to throw their money away on things that are poorly designed or manufactured, so naturally, when we buy, we want know as much as possible about what it is we’re buying.
We want to base our buying decisions on information we deem honest, reliable, fair and unbiased, and online reviews help form our opinions and shape our attitudes in ways that product descriptions and hyped-up sales pitches simply can’t.
Convenience
Put simply, most of us are pretty lazy – so if a quicker, easier, less stressful option exists, we’ll take it.
Online shopping means that we can buy the latest gym equipment without ever getting out of bed, or order clothes in less than 10 minutes on our lunch break.
High street shopping usually means overly crowded streets, travel, no parking spaces and a whole lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety.
With less time and effort, we can find the items we want online, add them to the cart and purchase with a click.
Who’d want it any other way?
