Online Shopping, Can you control it?

Imagine just surfing the internet for the culture or some pastime and then you suddenly come across that amazing shoe, perhaps the latest collection from one of the labels you so much adore and the beautiful part is they are offering some discount; Yes, Discount is the validation here. 

All thanks to the new age and the better side of technology, push notifications, newsletters, and perhaps some turn-on post notifications have greatly influenced the choice of shopping. 

Research had also shown that certain a good number of individuals who had purchased items online were fueled by ads or notifications which were suddenly received while surfing the net. While this sounds amazing to the seller, it further attests to the fact a large percentage of shopping closed online was never top-notch on the scale of preference, let alone opportunity cost.  

Going by the colorful ads and stunning models used to sample some of these amazing products or deals, online users are more likely to check the items for sale if the graphics are top-notch picture resolution, likewise the models and more importantly, the inclusion that the item[s] is Discounted. The latter works like magic. 

If you had followed our trend of articles, which has been brought to you by The Watchtower - Web Design Agency, Dubai; we had mentioned some biases in which online brands implore to influence their sale, amongst which is the Anchor Effect. In the previous paragraph, I was referring to how people tend to easily jump on anything that appears as a Discount or Sale. The Anchor effect happens to be a situation when merchants pose as though they are doing you a favor; to shed more light, merchants state an initial price to their service/goods before the sale/discount and their new offering. This beautiful gesture as the buyer looks at it is enough validation to purchase items. 

While I could go on with the many reasons people shop online from a point of need to a place of addiction, impulse buying and compulsive buying hits a good spot for discussion in addictive buying. 

Impulse buying could be said basically to be an unplanned purchase that happens on the spur of the moment in reaction to the immediate desire to have something you have seen at a store. Impulse buying is just a little different from compulsive buying, in the sense that Compulsive buying is more of being pre-planned as a way of escaping negative feelings. However, people who have a shopping addiction may engage in both types of addictive purchasing. 

Shopping addiction shares a few characteristics with other addictions. People who over-shop, like other addicts, become preoccupied with spending and devote significant time and money to the activity; the addictive pattern for shopping is driven by the process of spending money.  

Shopping addiction, like other addictions, is highly ritualized and follows a typical addictive pattern of thoughts about shopping, planning shopping trips, and the shopping act itself, which is frequently described as pleasurable, even ecstatic, and as providing relief from negative feelings. Finally, the buyer/shopper crashes, filled with dissatisfaction, particularly with himself/herself. 

It is easy to therefore say that shopping addiction is a contentious concept. Experts frequently dismiss the notion that excessive spending is an addiction because a psychoactive substance that produces symptoms such as physical tolerance and withdrawal is required to make an activity a true addiction. Although we can almost hang on to that, some clinical literature suggests that compulsive shopping should be classified as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an impulse management disorder such as kleptomania or compulsive stealing, depression, or a behavioral addiction such as gambling disorder. 

Wow! Deeper than what you had imagined, right? 

Look out for my next article, as I further show easy control measures to helping out this new culture of shopping addiction. 

For more interesting information on Online shopping, Website development, Digital Marketing, and SEO, you can always trust The Watchtower, the best and award-winning Website Development Company, Dubai.