海角大神

Recently, I listened to a story on NPR (for the life of me, I can鈥檛 find a link to it on their website) where developers at Amazon.com were discussing their goal in shaving seconds off of the time it takes for a person to come to their site with a desire in their head and to have purchased that item. For them, the goal is聽thirty seconds.

Think about that for a second. Thirty seconds.

Amazon has a聽huge聽array of consumer goods available on their site. You can go there and type in just about anything, from Bob鈥檚 Red Mill oatmeal to baseball cards, from a new hard drive to a new shirt, from a magazine subscription to a new record for your record player.

In other words,聽Amazon is an impulse buyer鈥檚 dream world. If you have a sudden impulse to buy something, you can go to Amazon and quickly find it.

They know this, of course, and that鈥檚 why they鈥檙e trying to get the speed of a transaction down to about thirty seconds. In other words, in roughly the length of time it鈥檚 taken you to read this much of this article, you could have bought an item off of Amazon.聽

Here鈥檚 the painful truth, though.聽The longer you have to wait to fulfill your impulse, the less likely you are to just buy something to scratch that itch.

It鈥檚 the same philosophy as to why grocery stores stock the checkout aisle with impulse purchases. It only takes a second or two to grab something, toss it on the conveyor belt, and have the checker scan the item and put it in your bag.

With other items, you have a lot of time to rethink the impulsiveness of the purchase. When you鈥檙e out in the store, you have all the time you want to make up your mind about an item. Even after you put it in your cart, you can rethink the purchase 鈥� you have plenty of time. There鈥檚 even another window to re-think a purchase when you put the item up on the conveyor belt to have it scanned.

Amazon is trying very hard to move from the 鈥渟hopping cart鈥� model to the 鈥渋mpulse buy at the checkout鈥� model. Why? It means that you spend less time thinking about and reconsidering your purchases.

(This does not make Amazon 鈥渆vil鈥� or a bad company in any way. It just makes them a smart retailer.)

So, what can you do as a consumer to fight back against this? Here are a few steps I鈥檝e taken with my Amazon account.

贵颈谤蝉迟,听I don鈥檛 store my credit card information on the site.聽I force myself to have to re-type in that info each time I make a purchase. Yes, it鈥檚 a hassle, but it makes me re-think that purchase with each of those digits that I type in. It adds another minute or so to the purchase cycle and brings the fact that I鈥檓 actually聽paying聽for this item to the front and center.

厂别肠辞苍诲,听I turned off my own address from the 鈥渙ne-click鈥� settings.聽This means I can鈥檛 just order an item to my home address with one click. It鈥檚 easy to do 鈥� just head to聽their address page聽and change the settings for your home address.

贵颈苍补濒濒测,听I regularly clear out my browsing history.聽The items you look at help Amazon to suggest better and better item recommendations for you when you鈥檙e browsing through the site. If you delete your browsing history, the recommendations get much worse, cutting down on the impulsive temptation. All you have to do is head toYour Amazon Browsing History聽and start deleting items. I do this regularly.

Those three steps will go a long way toward making shopping at Amazon a less impulse-driven 鈥� and less expensive 鈥� experience.