Understanding Buyer Motivation: Getting More of Your Ecommerce Customers to Checkout

A three stages journey is described in the psychology of buying motivation is the real reason behind why a customer makes a purchase. As an e-commerce store, you need to know those underlying reasons why customers are purchasing a particular product. You can pair those factors to target the right audience and motivate the customers to make a purchase.

How you can uncover the reasons behind buying motivation? How you can put these reasons to perfect use to increase your sales? Let’s learn about this important aspect of e-commerce.

What is Buying Motivation?

Every sale you achieve at your e-commerce store is motivated by a reason. Buying motivation can be a thought, feeling, or instinct that could force or move the person to purchase a particular product. This is by far the most important factor involved in a successful sale.

It doesn’t matter if you have a standout out product or bestseller, if the buying motivation is missing, the person won’t purchase the product.

To understand this better, we have to learn about the concept of the buyer journey. The buyer journey is the way how a customer progresses through some stages of buying decisions and eventually make the purchase.

Buyer journey

• Awareness

The first stage of the buyer journey begins with him acknowledging or becoming aware of a need or problem. Let’s say you need to go out in the sun and the blazing heat burns your eyes, the first thing that would come to your mind is getting sunglasses. This is the first part of a buyer journey and is called awareness.

• Consideration

The second stage is considering the possible options that you can avail of. In the case of sunglasses, you’ll consider different brands or types of glass.

• Decision

The third and last part of a buyer journey is making the final call and buying the product or service.

What Motivates Customers to Buy?

The motives behind buying a specific product can be one or more. Let’s look into some motivation factors that force a customer to buy something.

• Fear of missing out

This is a popular motivation factor discussed in modern marketing psychology. This particular factor is mostly associated with millennials. Let’s understand this with an example if a customer sees a product on a website but not willing to buy it immediately—suddenly he looks at the headline saying “only 5 items left,” that’s where fear of missing out will trigger in his mind and he’ll quickly make the purchase.

• Desire

It is a primary motivating factor for most of the customers. They have a desire to gain something and possess something particular so they’ll purchase it.

• Security and safety

People want to stay safe and secure and some specific products are only bought to achieve a sense of security and protection.

• Comfort

Some specific purchases related to convenient living like home appliances are motivated by the desire to get a comfortable living.

• Pride

Some buying decisions like buying an expensive item is associated with feeling proud just by possessing a luxury item. This sense of pride in ownership can motivate people to buy something.

Ways to Find your Buyer’s Motivation

You can use your customer service channels to identify what customers are inquiring about. Look out if they are asking for coupons, discounts, and offers—or any other information that can identify the motivation behind their buying decision.

Pay a detailed look at your customers’ activities on your website like what kind of products they’re looking for and which part of your website is most visited by our customers. This can help to understand the motivation behind their buying decision.

Activate your web analytics and take a deeper look into the demographics of your audience. Identify the prominent geographic locations from where customers are coming, their age groups, and other such demographics. That’s why every b2b e-commerce development agency greatly focuses on the use of web analytics.

How you can get the Most Out of Buyer Motivation to grow your Sales?

The user interface plays a great impact on motivating the customers. When you’ve identified the buying motivation of your customers, you need to translate that motives into actions. Like, targeting the customers who buy luxury products to achieve pride in ownership you should use luxury images and sharp shades that trigger their senses and motivate them to buy. Every b2b e-commerce development agency focus on a perfect user interface.

You can use fear of missing out to motivate customers who make their buying decision if they fear to miss out. You can add headlines like “3 items left” to motivate potential customers.

Motivate those loyal customers who look for offers and discounts by asking them to quickly check out and take part in winning gifts and vouchers.