How to encourage impulse buying online

Christ­mas, along with many oth­er things, will look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent this year. Fam­i­lies are con­sid­er­ing resized turkeys for small­er gath­er­ings, the result of coro­n­avirus restric­tions. And bricks-and-mor­tar retail­ers are won­der­ing whether they’ll get a reprieve from lock­down, grant­i­ng a small win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty for Christ­mas shop­ping.

Impulse buy­ing accounts for 16 per cent of over­all retail sales, by one esti­mate, which means every day shops aren’t open in the run-up to Christ­mas is a lost oppor­tu­ni­ty. Fam­i­lies have their shop­ping lists, but once the main Christ­mas presents are bought, it’s often off­hand pur­chas­es that make up most of con­sumers’ spend­ing.

“I might have some vague ideas of the kind of shop I want to go to, but being in that envi­ron­ment and spot­ting some­thing is use­ful,” says Gra­ham Soult, a retail ana­lyst. “I think that’s one of the joys of shop­ping in a bricks-and-mor­tar envi­ron­ment com­pared to online. The nature of online is you can’t find some­thing ran­dom unless you search for it. It’s much hard­er to stum­ble across those things in an online world.”

Yet with high street shops shut, and the num­ber of shop­ping days until Christ­mas rapid­ly tick­ing down towards zero, the retail sec­tor is in a quandary. How can retail­ers encour­age impul­sive pur­chas­es when the shops them­selves are closed and those that remain open are oper­at­ing on the basis of get­ting peo­ple through as quick­ly and safe­ly as pos­si­ble?

Less time in stores means less time at the tills

“There is a strong cor­re­la­tion between shop­per dwell time and retail sales,” explains retail ana­lyst Natal­ie Berg. “The longer we spend in-store, the more we spend at the tills.” How­ev­er, in a world where social dis­tanc­ing is para­mount, the amount of time spent in stores is lim­it­ed and lay­outs are strict­ly con­trolled to ensure the least pos­si­ble dan­ger, the oppor­tu­ni­ties to influ­ence impulse buy­ing are almost non-exis­tent.

And online stores aren’t a real replace­ment for the oppor­tu­ni­ty of lazi­ly brows­ing dis­plays that help influ­ence the buy­ing deci­sion of shop­pers. “Online shop­ping will be a vital part of this Christ­mas,” accord­ing to the British Retail Con­sor­tium, the indus­try body. “As such, retail­ers will have to be more inno­v­a­tive than ever to encour­age more cus­tomers to make impulse pur­chas­es online.”

But, says Berg, that goes against years of inno­va­tion. “If you take a step back and think about ecom­merce gen­er­al­ly, the retail­ers have been focused on tak­ing out fric­tion from the ecom­merce expe­ri­ence,” she explains. Yet fric­tion is what trans­lates into impulse buys.

Using Zoom to shape buying behaviour

Some are try­ing to encour­age impulse buy­ing dig­i­tal­ly. DRAKE The Book­shop in Stock­ton-on-Tees is proud­ly inde­pen­dent. Its cus­tomers come from far and wide to browse the shelves and pick the brains of own­er Richard Drake and his staff. “When some­one is in the shop, you can have that two-way con­ver­sa­tion,” explains Drake, who rec­om­mends books based on cus­tomers’ past inter­ests.

Amazon’s “peo­ple like you also pur­chased” algo­rithm, based on the col­lec­tive shop­ping his­to­ry of its mil­lions of cus­tomers, goes some way towards doing that. But no one brows­es through Ama­zon in the same way as they mean­der through phys­i­cal retail stores, says Berg. “Those impulse buys are hard­er to repli­cate in a dig­i­tal set­ting,”
she says.

Drake has years of expe­ri­ence lay­ing out his shop, plac­ing items he knows make for good impulse pur­chas­es in strate­gic loca­tions to pique shop­pers’ inter­ests. The abil­i­ty to encour­age impul­sive pur­chas­es makes a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence to the bot­tom line of his busi­ness, which is why he’s decid­ed to try and repli­cate some of that online.

He has offered shop­pers the abil­i­ty to peruse his prod­ucts through Zoom. “We have one lady who has been shield­ing and read­ing a lot of Mai­gret,” he says. “I thought I could stand in front of the crime sec­tion and talk her through a few bits she knows and add them to her ‘to be read’ pile.”

Enabling online stores to influence impulse buying

It’s an exam­ple of the abil­i­ty for small­er shops to react quick­er to cir­cum­stances, some­thing we’ve seen time and again through­out the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. “Inde­pen­dents are prob­a­bly nip­pi­er, gen­er­al­ly,” says Soult. “We’re see­ing the agili­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty of inde­pen­dent retail­ers in using oth­er ways to get their mes­sages across.”

That’s not to say some larg­er brands aren’t also try­ing to repli­cate the offline expe­ri­ence online in the hope of stok­ing impulse buy­ing behav­iour.

“Con­sumer demands haven’t dis­ap­peared, they’ve just shift­ed or piv­ot­ed,” says Berg. “That’s where there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty. How do you trans­late that beyond click­ing on some­thing and get­ting the ‘you may also like’ rec­om­men­da­tion.”

Retail­ers such as Diesel and L’Oréal have tak­en advan­tage of vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty to launch vir­tu­al show­rooms, where it’s pos­si­ble to try on items vir­tu­al­ly and test them on skin to see how they look: a dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the phys­i­cal world.

And while it may seem a strange sit­u­a­tion to be in, the sec­tor seems hardy enough to weath­er the storm. “It’s nev­er good to have to close your doors in Novem­ber in the run-up to Christ­mas and one of the peak trad­ing peri­ods, but I think I keep mak­ing the point that I’m heart­ened by the pos­i­tiv­i­ty and resilience a lot of busi­ness­es are show­ing,” says Soult. “That’s one of the good sto­ries to come out of this. It reminds us quite how clever and cre­ative a lot of retail busi­ness­es are out there.”