No checkouts, no chocolate: Online shopping hits impulse buys | Hacker News Reader

No checkouts, no chocolate: Online shopping hits impulse buys

reuters.com

30 pointsAmadou20 comments

Interestingly, I find that online shopping permits me to diversify my impulse buys to products I normally wouldn't ever have the option of buying.

The chocolates and gum in supermarkets, convenience stores, and pharmacies are all the same 50 or so products everywhere you go, sold by the same half-dozen candy companies. Instead of getting these candies, I can instead buy more interesting candies and other foodstuffs that I've not yet tried or find hard to get.

Online shopping is going to hurt the fat tip of the power-law distribution and move things out towards the tail. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an otaku of impulse candy buyers already out there or forming now, who focus on blogging and tweeting about more interesting candy than those at the fat tip of the curve.

I want to subscribe to one of those as soon as I have disposable income - http://skoshbox.com/ / http://www.candyjapan.com/ (sends you a box of japanese candy each month!)

Thank you for making me aware of that candyjapan service, it seems to be the greatest thing ever. Definitely going to subscribe!

Coincidentally, its creator is also an HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745694

"In Britain, the country where e-commerce is most popular, about 13 percent of people do all or most of their grocery shopping online. Yet this only accounts for 5 percent of overall spending, suggesting consumers spend more when they visit a store."

I don't think you can draw that conclusion from the evidence. Perhaps the people who shop online are the ones who spend less - there isn't likely to be a linear relationship between spending and impulse buying, and people who spend less are possibly more likely to be the ones who go online first (no kids, relatively affluent, time poor seems a likely demographic). As someone who doesn't like being in a supermarket I went in, got what I needed, and got the hell out as fast as I could. I don't impulse buy because I'm focused on speed. I don't browse. When online shopping came along I was a very early adopter - I switched my supermarket brand choice so I could use it.

On the flip side, online retailers have a much stronger opportunity to up-sell products -- they can up-sell on a per-product basis, whereas physical retailers are bound by shelf space to up-sell/cross-sell.

Online can match products by consumer, too, and even do small A/B tests on pricing of individual items. That's powerful. Grocery stores have a much harder time price testing.

"Companies most at risk are Mondelez International, Mars Inc and Nestle, the top three candy makers, soda makers like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, and magazine publishers like Time Warner and Hearst Corp."

All companies that arguably are doing nothing for betterment of humanity. Perhaps this Internet fad is a good thing.

If you think humanity would be better off without the occasional ice cold Coca-Cola, I think you don't understand much about humans.

We don't work just to 'better ourselves' as philosophers and artists, we work to enjoy things in life. Maybe Coca-Cola doesn't do it for you, but everyone else who enjoys it isn't necessarily brainwashed.

When a bottle of coca-cola is cheaper than a bottle of water, yes I think that that company, out of many, deserves a little less market share.

I strongly suspect this has more to do with bottle water being overpriced (you're paying for convenience). Also, who cares that coca cola is cheaper? Why is that "bad for humanity?"

But that's not what you said. You claimed Coca-Cola was doing "nothing for the betterment of humanity". The billions of dollars people spend on their products suggest they're either providing some benefit or have brainwashed their customers. I guess I have a little more faith in humanity than you do.

I urge you to step into a supermarket or corner store/dairy, in any country outside of an area of affluence. Are you familiar with the concept of Food Deserts?

"Because of the Agriculture and Food policies soon people living in food deserts will have only a couple of food producers to choose from: Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kraft and Kellogg’s."

http://saynotofoodwaste.org/2013/06/03/food-deserts/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Coca-cola disappears tomorrow and what happens to that food desert? It gets better? How?

Really? You think it's OK that hundreds of thousands of people strangely only have access to pre-processed foodstuffs, because shipping and storage regulations, geographical distances, poverty etc mean they can't put fresh healthy items alongside their emblazoned Coca-Cola refrigerators? In rural areas like Mexico where tomatoes are left on the vine because NAFTA made it cheaper to buy U.S. vegetables and corn (thanks subsidies), and a bottle of water DOES cost more than a can of coke and it's still owned by Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kellogs, Kraft: they all make sugar water and empty calorie products, providing cheap consumables to the population thanks to agricultural subsides and tax breaks. There is nothing good, at all, about these companies and if they all disappeared tomorrow perhaps for a day or two we'd be oh! where's my coke! And then buy some caramel coloured pop from somewhere else. Do you miss Asbestos and CFCs? Weren't they convenient also?

What you are missing there is that cost of the liquid is negligible compared to that of the logistics.

This is not a free market experience. Coca-Cola et al would not be able to afford to deliver to remote areas with the huge subsidies they are receiving. There are taxes then subsidies then taxes upon taxes you've already paid..

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/65373/

So basically, online shopping hits big food corporations because they can't exploit people's basic instinct to trick them into buying something they don't really need?

That's actually a good thing.

In public, an impulse shopper might buy $3-$10 worth of chocolate and magazines, but in private they might buy $30-$100 worth of Kickstarter kipple.

I would think the upsell happens in email before, during the shopping experience, or completely after the online checkout is done, not during the checkout process. Upsell during checkout is kind of a grocery store concept. At least those is common in my industry.

As it's hinted to at the end of the article, better consumer habit tracking and targeted discounted low friction shopping cart adds with would probably make up for a lot of what is lost trying to port real world shopping behaviors into online stores (an utterly different experience)

I think it is just a question of habit. When I started online shopping, I have reduced impulse buys (candies, ...). Now, I add them to the list.

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