Perceptual Contrast — Apply Sales Tactics in Retail to E-Commerce
In human perception, there is a principle that affects our seeing habits between two things, a principle of contrast.
As a simple example, if the second object is different than the first, we have a tendency to see it differently than it actually is. If we first lift a light object and then a heavier one, we tend to believe that the second object is actually heavier than it would feel like if we hadn’t lifted the first object. We said simple but it may sound more complicated.
The principle of contrast has also taken its place in psycho-physics and is valid for our perception of everything. If you talk to a beautiful women at a party, then meet someone who is less attractable to us, the second women may appear less attractable. (Hush feminism, science speaking.)
Clothing retailers are also a good example for this. For example, let’s assume someone wants to purchase a three-piece suit and a vest from Beymen. The sales personnel of clothing retails are told to show you the most expensive item first.
We first sell a TL 1000 three-piece suit and when it comes to the vest, their prices will not seem expensive when compared to a suit. Therefore, when you show that customer a TL 100 vest, they will not find it expensive and give pass the decision to purchase.
We already use the principle of contrast in many sectors today without noticing. Assuming I’ve provided the necessary information above, let me get to the point; how are we to apply it in e-commerce?
Again, let’s think that you are a clothing shop, now you are online but you cannot advise them to purchase the expensive product and then the cheaper vest. Don’t do it anyway :) Because, the customer is now in their home or office lacking many outer psychological effects and even if they communicate with your live support system, it will not be you who they are focusing on but the website of the product.
Many e-commerce infrastructures have cross-sales and up-sales functions. I prefer products to be added to these sites to be thoroughly selected by the category or product responsibles. I will also suggest you to do the same. If the product to be promoted is TL 1000, prefer a product that is genuinely related and be considered as “nice to have” with a more affordable price.
Thus, when your customer clicks on the TL 1000 product and gives the purchasing decision and adds it to their shopping cart and sees a cheaper product that they will deem as purchasable and will examine it for a minute and add it to their shopping cart.
Now, you may say that we have entered into this e-commerce business to reach to more people and earn a lot of money and now you’re saying do this. Isn’t there an automatic system that does this?
You are right and there is. There are thousands of advice motors and automatic associated cross-sell and up-sell software. However, there is a concept that we always lack in human-machine interaction: artificial intelligence. Besides this there is something called the user experience
No matter how good you program these advice motors and enter the highest possible number of data, it will never equal to the thought process of an experienced salesmen. You may have 10,000 active products and your software may benefit you to associate 3000 products in other words 30%. But why would you only settle for 30% of the software you paid 100% for? Wasn’t earning money the reason? But you have to show effort for this.
Let me come to artificial intelligence. Today this is how things work: Pre-defined data is manually adjusted with pre-determined rules for once. The system scans your products and based on the priority ratings it has designated and its complex algorithm, it automatically associates your cross and up-sale products. However, like I said, the success rate isn’t high and this is because artificial intelligence is formed of pre-defined rules and algorithms. Therefore, as it does not have the thought process and logic of a real life experienced salesmen, it may suggest silly and irrelevant products to customers who visit your website.
Let’s discuss User Experience . Like we said, if it offers irrelavant products the result may be this: During the purchasing phase (checkout process if we want to use the fancy phase), it causes them to pause for a second. Your customers may think, “Where did this come from? Let me check this out as well,” meaning your customers may fall victim to the artificial intelligence and prefer a cheaper product, which damages the process in the end.
However, if you can define the three-piece suit worth TL 1000 to your system correctly, add nice photos and your customers thinks, “Ok, if it’s this expensive then it means it’s of high quality” and add the product to their cart and then the vest you’ve defined as an up-sales product appears and says “Look, you’ve purchased this for TL 1000 so this is way cheaper and of the same quality. I don’t think you should miss out on this one,” and then the customer might say, “Ok, this is really good,” and addd it to the cart and complete the purchasing process and you don’t have to give ads like the biggest sale of the season to anywhere else, wouldn’t it be nice? Maybe.
We have used fancy words and a sentence involving perceptual contrast but what we do is basically AOV optimization. (Average order value)
Then the business becomes stable and good so what would it be called? Conversion optimization
What did we think these were? Let’s do this button green, let’s enlarge the menu a bit and then compare these to see which one got higher clicks?
This is not how it goes.
