Why do we buy online? the 3 factors

An Online Store Frontpage – Foraker.com

Often companies start their e-store thinking that customers will come and buy, because there are billions of people surfing online everyday. That is not true.

As customers, when we decide to buy online, we do it because of some important factors:

We buy online, because we often have a wide range of products available. We can choose between hundreds of products that to basically exactly the same thing. We also usually buy something that is not available in our local store. If the product online is exactly the same as offline, we usually buy it offline, because we can see it, try it, and receive information from the seller. Now three factors come into the decision process: price, time, trust.

If there is a huge difference in price, for the same product, the modern customer buys it online.  Thanks to the Internet customers are now much more informed. They can read product descriptions, they can compare products and they can read reviews from real users about the product. This means that the role of the seller is sometimes reduced to beeing a simple cashier or checkout assistant. If the big price difference is there, no story: we buy online.

Online shopping also gives to the customer the possibility to save time. We do not have to go to the shop, in order to buy a product. We do not have to stand in the queue with our car, try to find a parking for the car, and more important: we do not have to wait the normal opening time of the local store. We can buy online 24/7 and we have only to wait for the carrier that rings to our door.

The third factor that is important to remember is trust. We, as customers, trust our local bricks-and-mortar store. It has been there selling his products for 30 years, it never moved and it is not possible to close it and make it disappear in a few minutes. But what about online stores? Often we do not know exactly who is behind the website. We do not know the person we are sending our money, to pay for our new jacket. That is really important. If a web store is not supported by a well-known brand, it needs to build up during years (you read it right: years!) an online reputation. One good way to start is to have a good looking website, offer regularly a stunning service to customers, price the products not so cheapily and think about every aspect of the website in order to reassure the customer. We are going to discuss about trust in one of the next posts.