A recent article in Entrepreneur by Scot Chrisman – 3 Psychological Biases That Affect Whether Someone Buys Your Product or Not – has some really important thoughts and insights for e-commerce merchants. This week, we’d like dive into each of these biases and discuss how you might change or modify your e-commerce experience in order to capitalize on them.

Let’s take a look and hopefully you can learn and gain from our suggestions:

1. Confirmation Bias

Chrisman defines confirmation bias in his article very clearly:

“Consumers love to feel right. They love to feel as though, they knew what was coming next. Like they’re ahead of the curve because they picked up on subtle clues. Confirmation bias is an important factor in crafting copy, content, and creative marketing strategies.”

Here are some methods for utilizing confirmation bias in your e-commerce experience design:

Pre-purchase thoughts: include ratings and reviews. If that’s not possible, include testimonials from a customer or two and highlight those testimonials as key content in your product description. If the product is not yours (you’re reselling it) include any information about positive news, pr, or awards that the product has won. You want to convince your customer that they are not only getting a good deal they can feel confident about but also how smart they are for choosing the best product. Confirmation bias can be utilized throughout the purchase product but keep it in mind as you craft not only your merchandising but your product detail and checkout experiences.

The following e-commerce features will also help to support confirmation bias and can be leveraged to help conversion rates:

Abandoned Cart Messaging

Abandoned browse messaging

Testimonials

Expert Reviews or Statements of support

Product description copy that can utilize truthful, honest superlatives

Use of Graphic-supporting content like award icons, badges etc

(Remember “as seen in TV?”)

2.Social Bias (The ‘Bandwagon’ Effect)

Chrisman describes the bandwagon effect this way:

“Since we all want to feel a part of the community, there are many things psychologically that we’ll do to test the waters and ensure we’re not going to do something against social norms. This is built into our psychological evolution in order to keep us safe, kind of like most of our psychological biases.”

Translating this to your e-commerce site may sound easy – appropriate and eye-catching integration with social channels, as well as the purchasing tools to support it – will help provide a sense of social bias in your purchasing experience. But it goes a step further than just promoting and selling your products on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

In a world so dominated by social media, where so many products are constantly visible to consumers, the real key to creating social bias is in ensuring prospective customers see your products being used by their peers or social groups that they identify with, in an apparently more ‘organic’ way. Some opportunities for ensuring this could be:

Create hashtag campaigns to ensure average customers are incentivised to promote your product (who know’s, maybe your brand will be ‘trending’ if you do it well)

Leverage the growing population of social influencers, this can cost more depending on the influencer (not every brand needs to hire a Kardashian and spend millions, there are many effective social influencer programs to tap into).

Build brand ambassador programs into your operating model

Often the key to creating a successful social media marketing program lies in creating a robust social media publishing calendar. The reality is that a one-off post from a high-cost social influencer will probably only be effective as part of a broader, long-term integrated social media marketing strategy.

Merchants should also consider content and merchandising adjustments that can help formulate social bias such as testimonials from VIPs or industry leader...