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Microprocessing
It’s a Good Thing That Shopping on Your Phone Is the Worst
You’re primed to make bad decisions when you shop on the go
In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today, to give you a better tomorrow.
There is no worse way to shop than on your smartphone.
I almost never do it, and I’m surprised that so many others do. Navigating online shops is a chore. Images rarely zoom or scroll correctly. It’s hard to compare one item to another. Large arrow icons block out parts of clothing or furniture, if they appear at all. Checkout functions aren’t well-suited to touch screens either; typing your address and credit card number into a new shop is miserable.
There are a number of ways user experience designers and hardware developers could make all of this a lot easier. But there’s a benefit to all these annoying barriers. Research shows we’re likely to make impulse purchases on our phones — things that are unnecessary and probably a waste of money. If you can’t even get the mobile site to work for whatever cute little brand you’re looking to drop a couple of hundred dollars on, you probably just saved some dough that’s better spent elsewhere.
According to research on consumers’ mobile shopping behavior, there are two types of purchases people tend to make on their mobile devices: “hedonic purchases” and “habitual purchases.” A hedonic purchase could be a pair of stylish shoes that you buy on a whim from an Instagram ad — something you want very much, not something that you need.
A habitual purchase is the sort of product a consumer buys regularly, like house supplies or beauty products, that are a part of the person’s regimen already. I talked to a number of acquaintances about their mobile shopping habits for this piece, and almost all of them told me that the bulk of their mobile purchases fell into one of the two categories, with items ranging from impulse eBay and Instagram purchases to, more often, pet and office supplies.
“I find that customers are more likely to buy products that they are already familiar…
