Credibility in online shopping and it’s importance in the user experience purchase decision process.
It’s a little bit weird to bring up this subject after 2 years in which e-commerces had a boost in the number of online stores and purchases made digitally, but perhaps precisely due to this growth, some factors may have been run over in this process.
I’m an insecure and anxious person by nature who doesn’t buy regularly online and so few are the shopping sites I trust to keep my data saved, in the certainty that when I need to make a purchase, they will be ready to be used by me.
That said, I can say that several times I went to websites or applications, saw the content, read their specifications and left without purchasing the product or service I desired. This happened with several websites/apps for food, medical consultation, buying a plane ticket or booking hotels.
Movie theater? Fight or flight
The last of these sites, where my confidence shook to leave my data and buy online, was in the leisure area, to be more exact, when buying movie tickets. The site itself, which shows movie sessions (by region), schedules, movie details, calendars and other advertisements is not bad, but to buy a ticket, I was redirected to another site and this one, did trigger a ‘fight-or-flight’ alert in my nervous system.
Well, I’ve been studying user experience for a while and I know I could even fight that impulse and maybe go ahead and make the purchase. If it didn’t work, I would reverse it, ask for a refund, and finally get in touch with my credit card to resolve the situation. On the other hand, my lazy, loss-averse brain, before I could even realize it, has already encouraged me to avoid all this work, minimizing the effort by simply not shopping online.
I would already have to go to the theater to watch the movie, so why not buy it directly at the box office? That’s exactly what I did. However the film was really being sought after and despite checking on the map that there were still a good number of chairs, nothing would guarantee that in the next few hours the session would be full.
May luck be cast
When I arrived at the ticket office and asked about the seats for the intended session, the attendant showed me the map. It certainly wasn’t crowded, but surely the best seats had already been taken. I bought it in a high row, farther into the corner and hoped it didn’t spoil the fun of the session.
I’m one of those who don’t like to leave things to the last minute, I do it really in advance, calmly even more slowly, when possible. And in this case I had even tried to buy tickets in advance, but the site didn’t help me with a minimally reliable solution (at least for my trustworthy profile, which is more rigorous).
For anxious people, the fact that something doesn’t go as expected creates a wave of devious thoughts. Until the ticket purchase was finalized at the box office, I simply thought of all the good, bad, extraordinarily bad possibilities, generating mental weariness for something that was supposed to be literally to kick back and relax a little.
An experience marks not only on the positive side
In the end, the session was good, the film really surprised me a lot, but it could have been even better, if all this mental wear and tear of the ticket hadn’t occurred. After that, I reflected on how things that should be pleasurable (and the simple act of buying generates dopamine in us) end up reflecting faulty user experiences, reducing the opportunity to offer the best to the consumer, retain them or earn referrals.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve had a bad situation shopping online and I know that many must have been through some kind of struggle too. The point is that we will increasingly buy online, trusting our data and the credibility of companies to deliver, replace or even return our purchases. And how well prepared and credited are they to address diversity in their shopping experiences?
Dealing with anxious, neurodivergent, people with visual, motor, cognitive impairments, all these people can go through the digital shopping experience, being the target audience or not and I believe that if we really want to value the sustainable growth of the e-commerce market, it is increasingly necessary to understand the importance of offering more security, trust and credibility to users, whether before, during or after the purchase process itself and be aware of the impacts of a bad experience on everyday life, beyond the digital.
