Impulsive Shopping Behavior
Shopping sites market lots of sales and specials with limited time. This is meant to attract customers and arouse a high emotional response. This leads to impulsive check-out in shopping carts. How might we encourage people to have a more rational shopping experience.
Assumptions busting
Common assumptions:
Social: The common assumption about this behavior is that it is social as you feel triggered to want to buy more clothes, possibly getting influenced by peers or surroundings of people pulling out coats and scarfs.
Egocentric: You want to shop for clothes in order to improve your image, or make yourself feel better surrounded by new things.
Behaviour Explanation:
Cold but Hot: We can explain the pattern of high arousal in sale shopping experience is cold but hot. This is connected to the ostrich effect as you feel a high arousal feeling intense about a 3 day sale and ignoring your clothes already in the closet and laundry basket.
Cognitive Misers: we refuse to think about the actual need for clothes as they fit in our wardrobe and lives, and go with the desire to acquire something short term. Cognitive dissonance seeps in and we “justify” the purchase short-term and suppress long-term emotions. It causes a feedback loop of shopping.
key behavior
behavior mapping
Final Solution
Experimental Design
Conditions:
Experiment：Imagine yourself shopping online for clothes：You open your favorite shopping site and see that there is a big sale going on. So you start browsing for items. You saw a something you like. And you start to think about whether or not you want to buy it. Before you made up your mind, you saw a pop-up on your screen saying: “Do you really need this? Go through your closet first and see if you really need this!”
Control：Imagine yourself shopping online for clothes：You open your favorite shopping site and see that there is a big sale going on. So you start browsing for items. You saw a something you like. And you start to think about whether or not you want to buy it.
