Are We Moving With the Times?
Posted On: 2011-06-02
I suppose I'm not like most people ... there are times when I do make impulsive purchasing decisions ... but not all that often. Maybe it's because I came from a socio-economic background that makes me a little wary of spending money but there are lots of people who aren't so reluctant to reach for the cash or their plastic passport to shopping heaven.
I guess that's just as well because there are a lot of retailers out there who do rely heavily on impulse buying and ... if some of the gurus in this industry are to be believed ... impulse buying is what keeps this industry afloat too. If that's true then maybe the lack of sales we're seeing at the moment is down to more than just the crappy state of the economy.
The results of some recent research in the United States has suggested that impulse buying is dying out and more and more people are turning to social networks, price comparison sites, coupon sites and/or group buying sites to do some research and discover the best price before they make a purchase.
And it's not just confined to the United States ... according to retailers here in Australia people are so keen to look for the best price for just about everything that the retailers are seeing a lot of people come into their shops ... look at the price tag on a product ... and they take out their mobile phone and go online to see if they can't get a better price somewhere else. They then watch those potential buyers walk right out of the store and obviously go home to make the purchase online.
So people are becoming less likely to be impulsive when it comes to buying a product ... in fact the study I mentioned a moment ago suggests that at least 55 per cent of shoppers have become less impulsive. And I guess we should even expect to see that sort of approach to buying the products we sell.
But perhaps here in adult we've seen a drop in the level of impulse buying and the rise of price comparison sites long before it became apparent in mainstream. It's now been years since the first porn review site was launched and over the intervening years that type of site has become more popular. So maybe we saw it all happen here first but we didn't understand what we were seeing.
Now that we may be seeing more buyers do more research before they buy our products perhaps it's time that we looked at other ways to attract more buyers. Perhaps the time is here to start looking at ways to go beyond the review sites and start giving buyers something similar to what we're seeing over in mainstream.
Obviously it may take a little effort on the part of sponsors to change the way a buyer pays for their product but why can't we offer coupons? Why can't we offer some form of group buying? Why do we have to be stuck with the way things have always been?
And while we're looking at the possibility of offering coupons and group buying deals why can't we also be looking at an adult form of price comparison sites? Why can't we go beyond the basic review sites ... some of which are so obviously biased in their reviews ... to something that more closely resembles those price comparison sites we see over in mainstream?
Perhaps we even need to go so far as to look at the colors we use on these sites so that they look a little less like a typical adult site just so that they have some visual authenticity that may influence surfers.
Of course if we did make a move towards some of those sites we would have to look at new ways of attracting traffic to the sites and if you built one you would want to encourage surfers to keep coming back so building anything like this and getting it the point where it's adding to your bottom line is not going to be a quick job.
Building a site like this would take some time to get right and then take time and effort to promote ... and of course there is no guarantee that it would work. But what's the alternative?
Our target audience is maturing and moving on and if we don't mature with it and go where it's going then ... well ... how's your burger flipping technique?