Businesses live and die on the purchases that you make, so perhaps it’s no surprise that online retailers have a huge range of techniques that they use to try to get you to spend more money.
Here are some of the sneaky tricks they use to get more out of you.
Minimum spend for free shipping
Have you ever noticed that when you order online, your basket is just under the total needed to qualify for free shipping? It’s no coincidence. Online retailers know the average spend of their customers, so they set a minimum for free shipping that is just a little bit above it. This means that you are faced with a dilemma – waste money on shipping or buy something else.
The retailers make it seem like this is a win-win situation for you – after all, you’re getting more stuff for your money instead of paying out for shopping. But they are the true winner; the shipping doesn’t cost them anything like what they charge so really they are just making the extra money from you.
Remembering your card details
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Online stores will often offer to save your card details to ‘make it easier for you next time’. How kind of them! Of course their making it more convenient for you naturally encourages you to make purchases. Online retailers understand they if they can put as few pages and clicks between the product and the sale, they have a better chance of you buying.
Having to take to the time to enter your card details every visit means that you have more time to think about the purchase and potentially even think yourself out of an impulse buy. When retailers save your data they are actually trying to ensure that you buy without putting too much thought into the decision.
Being available 24/7
This one isn’t exactly a sneaky trick, it’s just a natural advantage that online shops have over their high street counterparts. Online stores are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Let’s remember that many purchases are the result of impulse decisions. If you see something in an advert on TV or notice someone in a nice shirt at work, you would previously have had to wait until you could get to a shop to be able to find it and buy it.
During the time that this takes the impulse to make the purchase can have worn off and you end up not buying this item. The advent of smartphones has only compounded this as you can now access online stores at a moment’s notice, removing any sort of time barrier between you desire to buy and your ability to buy.
Automatically signing you up to emails
Making a purchase through an online retailer will often mean that you sign up to their email communications as well. You often have the option to opt out of these emails, but it’s not always clear how to do this and this can lead to your inbox being flooded with offers from the store. For some people this is just an aggravation but for others, these sorts of sales emails put products in their eye line – this makes it much easier to make additional purchases.
Generally the default setting for signing up with an account will be for emails to be sent out to you. This is undoubtedly simply a way to bring you back to the store and get you to spend more money.
Remembering items for you
Another ‘convenient’ feature of many online retailers is their ability to remember which items you have looked up. This gives them the chance to present them to you in future. Of course, this kind reminder is just another way to try to get you to spend money in the store.
Article provided by Mike James, an independent content writer working together with Best VPN.
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