Article
Eye line is buy line – impulse buying on
fashion websites
The findings from a recent study suggest that the number of external trigger
cues for impulse buying may be a factor that affects a retailer's profitable
success by encouraging online impulse purchases.
Impulse purchases are very important to a retailer's profits. The Internet serves as a
convenient shopping channel, and can be seen as an alternative impulsive channel.
Whilst the increased convenience in online shopping compared to traditional brick
and mortar shopping is advantageous to many shoppers, such convenience may
also encourage impulse buying.
Online shopping has been the fastest growing channel of shopping for more than a
decade with sales growing at an annual rate of 25 per cent. Online apparel products
consistently rank among the most popular product categories sold over the Internet.
A typical online shopper spends about 30 seconds viewing a website before they
decide to click away or view the merchandise on a website. This makes creating an
enticing website ever important in drawing shopper's buying attention. Also, impulse
buying behaviour is primarily stimulus driven. Effective use of marketing strategies on
retail websites is likely to promote impulse buying. Leading online retailers realize the
influence and increased profit potential of marketing cues and have increased stimuli
on their sites.
Impulse buying stimuli
Merchants are optimizing sales cues, promotional cues, idea oriented cues and
suggestion cues. The percentage of e-tailing's top 100 merchants who offered an
online outlet or clearance section on their sites increased 10 per cent in 2008 (a jump
to 82 per cent). Online retailers offering competitions on their sites increased by 10
per cent, free gifts with purchases increased 9 per cent, and customer review facilities
increased 8 per cent. The E-Tailing Group in 2007 reported that 77 per cent of
surveyed consumers said their online purchases were significantly influenced by
customer reviews, top consumer rated-products, and top-selling products presented
on a retailer's website.
Impulse buying defined
Impulse buying can be defined as “a sudden, often powerful and persistent urge to
buy something immediately”. Unplanned or unintended purchasing has been
commonly associated with impulsive purchasing by many researchers, and an
unplanned purchase is necessary for categorizing a purchase as impulsive.
Unplanned buying refers to purchases that were not planned in advance, and
includes impulse buying. How fast the impulse purchase decision was made
distinguishes the two. Impulse purchases occur in a shorter time span than
unplanned purchases as the impulsive decision to buy is made quickly and after
being exposed to the product.
Impulse buyers are more willing to accept spontaneous buying ideas and are less
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likely to thoroughly evaluate their purchase decisions than a typical informed shopper.
They instead want immediate gratification from a purchase, and therefore purchase
without consideration of the consequences. A mysterious attraction draws the
impulse buyer in and motivates them to buy the product.
Online shoppers have been found to be more impulsive than non-online shoppers.
There are five recognized factors that encourage impulse buying:
1. Shopping online provides anonymity; consumers can shop impulsively
without embarrassment.
2. The Internet provides easy access, allowing consumers to make
purchases 24/7.
3. The Internet provides a greater variety of goods.
4. Direct marketing and personalized promotions lead consumers to
impulsively buy.
5. Consumers can use credit cards online which encourages impulse
purchases.
Consumption Impulse Formation Enactment (CIFE)
The Consumption Impulse Formation Enactment (CIFE) model states that there are
three antecedents that form a consumption impulse:
1. Marketing stimuli.
2. A person's impulsivity trait.
3. Situational factors.
According to the CIFE Model, it is important for online retailers to provide an
adequate amount of marketing stimuli on their websites to entice consumers to
impulsively buy online. These are marketing stimuli because the marketers can
control the presentation of the product and trigger the consumption impulse.
The specific marketing stimuli can be categorized like so:
●
●
●
●
Promotions
Ideas
Sales
Suggestions
Each category can then be sub-categorized:
Promotions:
o buy one-get one free deals
o coupons
o percentage off when spending a certain limit
o free gift with purchase
o free shipping or shipping discount
o ability to return online purchase in a physical store
o competitions
o membership discount
Ideas:
o whether the online shopper could shop by featured outfits
o by new styles or fashions
o featured items on a website
o top picks or favourites
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o gift ideas
o items presented in price points
Sales:
o clearance items
o markdowns
o limited time only sales
o emboldening a description of the actual product on sale
Suggestions:
o coordination items
o similar items
o customer favourites
o reviews and recommendations
o last item/previous items viewed.
Two main categories have emerged in research as the main drivers of impulse buying
online were the promotions and ideas categories. As such, it’s no surprise that
content analysis shows that the promotions and ideas categories are the most
common on apparel websites. Research also shows that these categories are the
most frequently observed in terms of “eyeballs”.
Impulse trigger cues
Arguably, online retailers have paid more attention to sales (e.g. on sale pricereduced items, emboldened sale prices on products) whilst other types of promotions
(e.g. free shipping, return purchase in store) may be more effective in encouraging
impulse purchases. Buyers have cited free shipping as an impulse trigger cue, but
online retailers seldom implement it. The findings of the study and the industry's
anecdotal evidence together suggest that online retailers may want to consider free
shipping as a promotional tool to increase impulse sales. However, the financial
ramifications may preclude this, which is why it is adopted so infrequently.
Just as there is a positive relationship between retailers' web sales and the amount of
external cues present on their website, as the amount of external impulse trigger cues
increases so does the profit. The top 30 apparel websites in terms of turnover provide
significantly more external impulse trigger cues than the bottom 30 websites.
Because of the positive relationship between retailers' profits and the amount of cues
available on a website, it’s reasonable to suggest that the websites' marketing tactics
contributed to their success. Less successful online retailers may then wish to adopt
this model.
Another interesting finding from the study was that the ideas category showed the
biggest difference between the top 30 best and worst-performing companies
analysed. The top 30 consistently provided more ideas-related external trigger cues
such as shop for an outfit, new styles/fashions, featured items, gift ideas, and price
point items. This suggests that less well performing online retailers need to provide
shopping ideas for their customers. Given the low financial commitment involved in
providing the ideas cues, this may be a fairly easy one for online retailers to adopt.
A growing trend is for merchants to offer physical returns of items bought online to
their bricks and mortar stores. Returning online merchandise by post or courier has
been a major concern for customers in the past and an acknowledged factor for
retailers in whether a customer is “wooed” into making an impulse purchase. The
option of returning an online purchase in store creates an advantage for the online
customer by providing more return options and locations. This is one example of how
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a customer can benefit from shopping with a multi-channel retailer. Because these
marketing tactics are advantageous to retailers' online channel, retailers should
recognize the opportunity of synchronizing these marketing tactics in all their
channels – online and offline.
September 2010.
This is a shortened version of “Cues on apparel web sites that trigger impulse
purchases”, which originally appeared in the Journal of Fashion Marketing and
Management, Volume 14, Number 2, 2010.
The authors are Sandy Dawson and Minjeong Kim.
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