28 Jul
One of the biggest things preventing you from making sales of your product, is something called buyer’s remorse. This term basically describes the feeling of deflation that many of us will feel when we splurge and buy something that we probably shouldn’t have. In all likelihood, you will have done it yourself: seen something you want and then spent money on it that you didn’t actually have.
We do this because we are motivated by the emotional promise of the product but then we feel guilty because we realise we didn’t really need it – and our child’s college fund probably did!
But sometimes, this buyer’s remorse can creep in before the buyer has actually clicked ‘buy’. They start to imagine how they’ll feel when they’ve bought the item and they realize that a piece of plastic is not really worth the guilt that will follow.
Your job as a seller is to make sure that they don’t have this realization. So how can you do that? One of the best strategies is to point out how the product is in fact an investment.
Now this can be a financial investment. If this is something that your buyer can use to work, then of course they stand to potentially make more money from it than they actually spent.
More likely though, it will be an investment in terms of the years of pleasure it will gain them. Or because the quality is so good, that they won’t have to replace it for a long time to come.
You can also combat the buyer’s remorse by telling them that they deserve it, or pointing out how important it is that we treat ourselves from time to time. If you can get them on board with this, then you’ll find that it’s a great way to encourage a sale when they were on the fence.
Other Barriers to Sale
What we’ve just discussed here is sometimes referred to as a ‘barrier to sale’. Simply, this means that it is something that is preventing someone from buying when otherwise they probably would have. There are countless other barriers to sale too and you need to consider and combat all of these to make the maximum amount of profit.
One example is trust. A lot of people don’t want to buy because they don’t trust your business or your site. Having a professional design and using a recognized payment gateway will help you get around this to an extent. Better yet, is to try selling something very cheap first. Here, the stakes are low. This means
that you can encourage someone to take the small risk and thereby test your business. When they’ve seen that you deliver, they can then build the courage to place a bigger order!
Another barrier is the time it takes to fill out your order form. This is why Amazon’s ‘Buy With One Click’ is so successful. What can you do to emulate that?
