Are My Online Purchases More Rational?

I’ve been shifting a lot more of my shopping online. Time is scarce. Convenience and price are paramount.

What I find interesting is that I believe this is making my consumption more rational. I’m less taken by emotional connection, because I’m not actually touching, feeling and listening to or smelling a product before purchase. I’m not subconciously influenced by the experience design of the store or the fostered approach of the salesperson. Instead, I’m comparing on factors like price, specs, reviews, within the same consistent environment: my laptop (now there’s a side discussion: do I purchase differently while wearing my tux or jogging pants?).

Then there’s the wait. Because I’m cheap and always select the free delivery, I wait 2-5 days for my purchase. That forced period further decreases emotion’s impact on my buying process, as pleasure from having it, the post-purchase high, is deferred.

What I suspect is that I’m slipping into an online buying approach for whole product categories. My collective consumption is likely not only more rational but slightly decreasing and smoothing out, avoiding big spikes in desire. That’s good, in my opinion. Now this doesn’t work for everything, clothes and food being obvious exceptions. My sandwich decisions are still completely irrational and inevitably hunger-based…

I was also entertained today by the fact that all shopping site use a notional ’shopping basket’ and ‘proceed to the checkout’ function. These functions bear only sybolic similarity to their real life namesakes, and could have been called anything (or designed in a fully different process). But while introducing a new and confusing environment for shoppers, site developers presumably found the reference to these established cultural norms helped people understand how to complete the online process. Can anyone think of other functional cues designers have used when moving between generations of design?

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(Best site I know on cultural norms in product design? Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect. Check it out. Shot above by Lukáš Malý on Creative Commons)

       

Tagged as: cultural, cultural cues, cultural norms, online shopping