February 29th, 2008 No Comments » | POSTED BY ROB

Have You Succumbed To Shopping Momentum?

Following the post about my little impulse purchase of an iPod Shuffle the other day, there’s an interesting look at part of the psychology of shopping over at Get Rich Slowly. In particular, the post discusses a research report which suggests that the more you buy, the more likely you are to buy more things.

To explain a little more clearly, the research suggests that once you’ve made a decision to purchase an item, subsequent decisions usually receive less thought, and as such people tend to buy more.

Can you relate to this? I know I’ve done it – I used to be particularly bad at this in record shops – often the first CD I bought would be the trigger to buy 3 or 4 in one go (anyone remember Fopp? – that particular record shop was responsible for this on several occasions when I was at University).

This is something that is easy to exploit online – Amazon, as well as many other sites, often use the items in your shopping basket to suggest similar items others have purchased or use your purchase history to suggest more stuff to buy – making it almost impossible to get away with a single item.