The psychological tricks of online stores

We're all wise to the little tricks that bricks-and-mortar stores use to tempt us to buy. Wafting the smell of freshly baked bread through the supermarket, knocking a penny off prices to make them appear a pound cheaper than they really are, the bright lighting used to make goods look more appealing.

Yet, few of us understand the subtle -- and sometimes not-so-subtle -- techniques used to part us with our credit card details online.

Online stores deploy all manner of psychological triggers and techniques to ensure that you don't leave the site without putting a couple of items in your basket -- and often the items that they want you to buy, and not what you set out to purchase in the first place.

The placement of buttons, reviews from carefully selected fellow customers, the number of product photos, the colours of the action buttons and even the design of the "checkout" itself have all been carefully tailored and tested to improve the site's "conversion rate" -- the ratio of site visitors who are turned into paying customers.

We've spoken to a panel of experts in online psychology and retail site design to reveal the methods used by the leading online retailers. We've marked up the sites of household names such as Amazon, Asos and EasyJet to show you exactly how they lull users into making a purchase.

Social proof

All of the experts we spoke to agreed on one thing: we're hugely susceptible to the opinion of our peers -- even if we've never met them before, or have zero proof that they're even genuine in the first place. Almost every leading retailer will rely on the power of user reviews to convince customers to make a purchase, to persuade customers that this a product that people like them should buy.

"One of the key things they [leading retailers] do is to provide what's called social proof," says psychologist Graham Jones, author of Clickology: What Works in Online Shopping and How Your Business can use Consumer Psychology to Succeed. "Part of the social glue that holds us together is that we like the things that our friends like -- it's the fuel that keeps the group going. It's a way of social groups reducing conflict."

That's precisely the instinct that Amazon and other retailers tap when they stuff their homepage and product pages with boxes claiming "people like you also bought this". According to Graham, "what they're doing is using the psychology of social proof to get you to buy things that, actually, you might not even have considered buying, but now your brain is saying 'well, I ought to have it because people like me have it'."

The degree to which retailers personalise these recommendations varies, but the pull is more powerful if retailers can show you have more in common with fellow purchasers. Stores may harvest the personal data you supplied at registration and your buying history to highlight reviews from those with similar traits.

You may even be offered discounts for filling out surveys, to give the stores richer information to base their recommendations on.

"It's not just about having user reviews on there but providing a point of identification," says Emma Travis, a strategist at retail conversion optimisation specialists PRWD. "If you could, for example, include the gender, the age, the interests of the person doing the review... that will allow someone on your website considering buying the product to say 'if it's suitable for them, it's suitable for me'."

Play to your ego

Sometimes sites play on people's egos to convince them that they fit into a certain category. "LinkedIn do this very, very well," says Nathalie Nahai, a digital strategist and author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. "They might put up '20 things every exceptional boss should know'. Then they'll use a lead saying 'good bosses do XYZ, exceptional bosses do more'. Because you've bought into the idea of being a good boss, but want to be exceptional, you have to read on and end up being sold to."

The ultimate endorsement comes from those you know personally. For example, Google uses the homepage of the Android Play Store to promote items that have been previously bought and highly rated by specific contacts, showing you their photo and star rating alongside an image of the product itself. The Store encourages you to "follow" others in your social circles to "learn from people in the know", increasing the authority and the trust you place in the store itself.

Data mining

The stores mine vast databases of buyer behaviour in order to recommend items that have been purchased by your peers, but don't for a second think that these items are highlighted purely because they're highly popular or rated by your contemporaries. "They will be choosing what's the most profitable thing for them to sell you, rather than stuff they make the least profits on," says Graham Jones. "They'll be selective in what they're pushing."

Reviews don't even need to be from specific people to increase trust in a site. Emma Travis says that sites can see a huge upswing in sales simply by promoting a unique selling point (USP) -- such as "nine out of ten of our customers rate this product highly" -- on their homepage. "We've run an experiment with one of our clients where they put a USP bar on their homepage with social proof in it, and it actually increased the key conversion rate by 20 percent."

Perhaps counter-intuitively, Travis recommends that clients don't hide or delete negative product reviews on their sites, because they can actually help to increase sales. "Having negative reviews is likely to increase the trust, because it says 'we're not perfect'," she says. If the retailer responds to the negative review, that's a further feather in their cap, because it shows the customer that the site cares about complaints.

Pricing tactics

Many of the leading retailers are highly price sensitive. Amazon can change the prices of key products several times a day if the spiders it has crawling other websites detect a cheaper price on a significant competitor. However, merely having the cheapest deal for price comparison engines isn't the only factor that online retailers take into account when setting prices -- there are some surprising psychological tricks being deployed, too.

Most buyers have got wise to the old trick of ending every price with .99 to fool them into thinking it's cheaper, but even knocking just a couple more pence off can be enough to boost sales. "You see online lots of prices ending in seven," says Graham Jones. "When you sell at $9.99, you don't sell quite as many as you do at $9.97. It appears that extra couple of pence makes people think it's cheaper."

Tricking the brain

It's not the only trick the brain plays on shoppers that retailers will exploit. "There's evidence to suggest that the longer it takes to say the words in the price, the more expensive we think it is," says Jones.

"On television, those adverts for the latest sales at DFS, won't say this is six hundred and ninety nine dollars, they'll say this is six-nine-nine. They [online retailers] will all be looking for ways to reduce the number of syllables in a price, because when we read it, were hear it in our heads. We need to 'hear' those prices in as short a time as possible."

That same principle can be used to put a more effective spin on sale offers, according to Natalie Nahai. Our brain processes numbers more quickly than it does words, so websites will generally do better when advertising goods as "50 percent off" rather than "half price", "two for the price of one" or "buy one get one free", simply because it takes our brain longer to process the words and, as well all know, the internet reduces our attention span to that of a toddler in a toy shop.

Even the order of the numbers in a price can affect our perception of value, according to Jones. Numbers presented in descending order appear cheaper than those that ascend. "If you've got something at $567 we perceive that as considerable more expensive than $543," says Jones, even though the difference is marginal.

Clearing stock

Retailers can also use pricing to push us towards certain products that they want to clear from stock. In the same way that inexperienced wine buyers will always go for the $15 bottle of plonk, because they don't want the cheapest, but not the most expensive, either, retailers can play similar tricks with the presentation of goods.

If given the choice between, say, two televisions on a website, most people will gravitate towards the cheapest. But if those televisions are presented in a tier of three options at a range of prices, "the one you actually want people to buy ends up as the middle option," says Emma Travis, because you've recalibrated people's perceptions of value.

Sometimes, however, retailers have to rely on pure data rather than psychology to work out how to set their prices, with customers often used as guinea pigs. Different pricing tiers are commonly used for the sale of services such as online storage or software, where you might get "basic", "pro" or "enterprise" accounts.

The benefits of these different tiers are often presented as tick boxes of different features, and Travis says sites will often experiment with different variations of the offer to work out which features are the ones customers are most willing to pay for. She reveals how one of her company's clients tested eight different variations of a feature table on their site, the winning variant recording an 185 percent uplift in conversions.

"There would have been no way we could have worked out through psychology which of those benefits would have triggered that customer," says Travis. "It was only through testing, with them actually seeing those different things laid out in a table, that we were able to see which one tipped them over."

Scarcity scare tactics

Anyone who saw that depressing Black Friday footage of grown adults scrapping in supermarkets to get their hands on the last of the cheap televisions will need no convincing that scarcity is a powerful trigger -- and it's one that online retailers routinely exploit.

The little "only 6 left in stock" label Amazon routinely puts on items or the "Hurry! Only four seats left at this price" pop-ups that EasyJet applies to flight search results are designed to stimulate one of our base human instincts. "This taps into a fairly basic survival instinct in our brain," says Jones. "If we go back through our evolution to when food was scarce, we were much more interested in it than when food was plentiful. People don't like scarcity. They fear they're going to miss out."

Budget airlines play on this fear particularly aggressively: they don't only tell you how few seats are remaining at that price, but how many other customers are searching for that flight at the same time (the truthfulness of those figures, only they know, of course). Many also use cookies to put the price up should you return to search for the same flight a day later, so that even if they don't get your custom this time, you're trained not to dither the next time you come looking for cheap flights.

Trading laws stipulate that online retailers must not lie to customers about the remaining stock of a particular item to pressure them into buying, but there are several ways to achieve the same goal: "only five left as this price" is a common tactic, before the item is then instantly restocked at a marginally different price. Voucher codes for certain products that end on a specific date are another means of creating artificial scarcity, as are ever-slipping delivery dates for new products. How many people have been convinced to order a new iPhone from the Apple Store when the due delivery date started slipping from days to weeks? Nobody likes missing out, even if they ultimately won't.

Site layout

We've covered several ways in which retailers can use emotional triggers to provoke us into action, but can the physical layout and colour scheme of the site itself make a similar difference? You bet.

Graham Jones says many web designers fall into the trap of trying to be too quirky with their site layouts. In the same way that you know the Baked Beans are in the second aisle of your local branch of Tesco, you expect the layout of a retail website to be instantly familiar too. "Most people will do most of their shopping with the big retailers: Amazon, Tesco, etc," he says.

"All of those big online retailers will have their shopping cart's checkout button top right, and their search bar in the top middle. If you're a retailer that hasn't got your shopping cart on the top right and haven't got your search bar top middle, then people don't know how to use your website. Many retailers are losing out on sales because they're not doing what those other big companies do."

That Amazon/Tesco-style template wasn't developed by chance: Jones says there's a very good reason why the big boys have all followed the same design. "Here [in the Western World] where we read left to right, our brain sees the left-hand side [of the page] as the past and the right-hand side as the future, so if you want people to buy something, you're better off putting your Buy Now button on the right-hand side."

Colours

The colour of those key buttons is also critical. Jones cites research showing that red Buy Now buttons generate better clickthrough rates than other colours, especially on sites targeted at men. "The reason for that is red is a potent sexual signal," he claims, pointing to examples such as red lipstick and, going back further down the evolutionary chain, baboons' backsides.

"Men are pre-wired to be interested in things that are red." Red is less of a turn on for women, which is why sites with a mixed audience, like Amazon and Asos veer towards a more neutral orange colour for their buying buttons. It still has that reddish hue to appeal to the male shoppers, without putting off the women.

Jones claims that many retailers make the mistake of using green buying buttons, because of the colour's association with "Go". However, it's not a strong enough call to action, with two of our experts independently citing research claiming green Buy Now buttons are less effective than reds. "You can be quite relaxed about whether you obey the green traffic light," reasons Jones. "You can't be relaxed about whether you obey the red".

All of our experts are sceptical of blanket claims about background site colours influencing buying behaviour, saying it's impossible to gauge whether a blue site will perform better than a white site, for example, without user testing. However, there are certain colours than come pre-loaded with connotations.

"In most Western European countries, the colour orange is associated with cheapness," says Nathalie Nahai, citing the EasyJet colour scheme. "In the Netherlands, it's the national colour and so orange is seen as very positive. You have to be careful of all these layers of meaning."

The seduction of photography

On the high street, shopping is a tactile experience: we brush our fingers past clothing, pick objects up, flick through books. Online buyers obviously don't benefit from that first-hand experience, which is why the most successful online stores bend over backwards to make shoppers feel as close to the products as possible.

Amazon's Look Inside feature, for example, replicates that real-world experience of flicking through a paperback in a bookshop, checking out the size of the print and the density of the copy.

One of the most successful ways of simulating real-world shopping is with photography. Lots and lots of high-resolution photos that shoppers can pore over on their high-resolution tablet screens, so that they can zoom in and see the weave of that fabric, the texture on the laptop lid, or the grain on that coffee table.

"Product photography is about engaging the customer, replicating the product as if it were in their hands," says Emma Travis. Attention to detail is a key means of winning customers from the high street. "One of our clients, Schuh, is particularly good at this. They take about eight photos per shoe, including the sole. I know that sounds really silly, but it's actually something that comes up quite a lot -- people want to know the tread of a shoe, if it has good grip... whether it's coloured. That kind of stuff does really help."

Photography, and increasingly video, is a key weapon for online clothes retailers, who are battling against frighteningly expensive return rates of up to 30 percent, because products don't look, feel or fit as the customer expected. Asos's sales shot up by 20 percent when they introduced catwalk videos of models wearing garments, according to Nathalie Nahai, because "people can imagine how it looks on themselves".

The Fits.me software -- available on sites such as TM Lewin, Thomas Pink, and Austin Reed -- goes one further. Shoppers are asked to enter their vital statistics -- weight, height, chest/bust/waist sizes -- and are then shown how the garment would hang on someone of that size.

They can flick between different sizes to see how switching from a medium to a large affects the fit of a shirt, for example. The software doesn't only drag down size-related return rates (by 77 percent, the company claims), but spares the self-conscious from potentially embarrassing trips to the store to try stuff on.

Sealing the deal

A staggering number of potential purchases are abandoned at the checkout. The Baymard Institute, which provides analytics for e-commerce sites, claims almost seven out of ten items added to an online shopping basket are never paid for. It's therefore crucial for retailers to do everything they can to make sure they seal the deal.

One way in which they do this is to borrow a trick from theme parks. In the same way Disney World will never let you see the full length of a queue for a ride, the sharper online stores will break up their checkout procedures into four or five shorter sections, so that you aren't put off by a lengthy looking form to fill in.

PRWD's Emma Travis labels this the "momentum effect". It "creates the illusion of progress because people feel like they're getting somewhere, that they've finished one page and are moving on to the next," rather than working through one long form.

Those four or five pages might have exactly the same number of fields to fill in as a site with one long page, but because the next ten questions are hidden you don't fret about filling them in.

Constant reassurance

Another way online stores prevent abandonments is with constant reassurance and encouragement as the customers makes their way through the checkout process. A progress bar telling a customer they have reached, say, stage three of five gives them a sense of achievement, almost turning the checkout into a mini-game that the customer wants to complete.

Even competing the most basic of tasks, such as getting their own name right, should be acknowledged. "Another thing we've found to be very effective at increasing completion rates is, every time someone fills in a field -- say their name, address or whatever -- if you add a green tick every time they've finished it, it gives the person a sense of being looked after," says Nathalie Nahai. "That's a very simple, subtle hack that gives people the sense of being rewarded."

It seems you really are very easy to please. And now you've completed this feature. Well done, you.