Whether they’re purchasing a trip or doing online grocery shopping , ultimately all consumers go through the same process of decision making. Generally speaking consumers normally go through 4 steps to make a purchase; they are: 

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Problem recognition

For example, summer vacation is nearing in and you want to take your family away for a couple of weeks. 

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Information research

Now that your customer has recognized a need, he’ll start searching for ways to meet that need. The decision-making process is influenced by many internal and external factors such as past experiences, prices, online reviews and word of mouth. 

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Alternatives Evaluation

After your customer has developed certain criteria about what he’s looking for, he starts looking for alternatives and makes comparisons between you and other competitors. Those differences might be in the price, added value or after purchase service. 

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Purchase decision

Once all the facts have been gathered, your customer finally makes his decision. If you’ve carefully done you’re job, the customer will choose you. 

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But those were the main reasons on how your customer makes his decision, there are other factors involved when it comes to ecommerce psychology.

According to HubSpot and Voucher clouds 57% of online consumers will abandon your site if it takes too long to load, but let’s look at other stats that affect your sales: 

1- 92% of people said that the website visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision.

2- Offering different views from the product leads to 58% more web sales.

3- 31% of people bought under the influence of videos

4- 85% of online shoppers read the reviews first

5- 41% of shoppers abandon cart after they’re hit with hidden fees.

6- 57% of shoppers said they wouldn't have bought had they not been given a discount

7- More than 80% of shoppers feel safer after seeing trustworthy card payment logos on the website. 

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Reaching your potential customer takes a lot of effort, research, aligning between sales and marketing and constant updates. At a certain time in your product’s life cycle it becomes a trial and error process, this either happens at the beginning when your business might still be shaky or when you’re a big business and trying to lead the market with your newest techniques. Look out for your customer, he’ll look out for your business. 

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If a customer visits your website, that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy, but it does mean that you can capture their behavioral data and retarget them on social media, so the probability of them buying is much much bigger than that of someone who never visited your website. If your ecommerce website is user friendly and optimized for both people and search engines and you have a clear strategy, you’ll end up converting prospects to leads to buyers. 

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Websites are a lot like movies, books, TV shows and other forms of media. They don’t succeed if they don’t hold people’s attention. If they don’t buy your content, they won't buy your product and a key way to do this is to understand their behavior.