How to get more people to buy: 7 retail tricks or price psychology

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

When I find myself on the sale of anything (clothes, appliances, shoes, household utensils … textiles ?!), it seems like Hyde wakes up in me. At such moments, I am very weak to control and going to sales with a decent amount in my pocket becomes a dangerous activity for the family budget.

Even in a more difficult situation there are those people who succumb to the magic word "discounts", "+1 for a gift" (even if it is a pressure cooker) and the magic number "9". One friend woke up with a fruit dryer in her hands already in the subway. Where did she buy this thing, and why did the girl need it at all, who only enters the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine - an interesting question. The answer has not yet been found, and the dryer has migrated to my grandmother's dacha for permanent residence.

A good salesperson should be a great psychologist and master the magic of numbers and other trading tricks that can get you to buy anything. And in order not to get caught in the network of discounts and sales once again, you should know just a few basic tricks that sellers use.

1. Free stuff

These are just those notorious "and get it as a gift." If the seller offers you some additional services to the purchased item, you should know - it's not easy! The concept of "free lunch" has its origins in Old New York, where Bowery taverns offered free lunches, with the expectation that after those dinners, diners would drink a lot of beer.

This trick still works. Usually, free items are offered to you in order to get you to a store or website so that you can buy something else there.

Psychologically, the word "free" implies the absence of disadvantages and risks. Standard "buy one thing, get the second as a gift", "free shipping", etc. acts on customers like Niels' magic pipe. You know that you will still spend money on buying things, but you cannot resist and follow the call of shopping, unable to stop and leave the store.

Quite recently, I observed a similar situation with a person from whom I did not expect such a reaction at all: in a shoe store there was another promotion “buy one pair - pay 30% of the cost for the second”. He began to persuade me to buy another pair of shoes for the company. The argument was ironclad: "Well, after all, the action is cheap!" The fact that I absolutely did not need shoes was of little concern to him. Discounts after all!

2. Bye bye, dollar sign

Another interesting study was conducted at Cornell University in 2009. The study found that diners in high-end restaurants spend significantly less on food when the word “dollar” is written next to it or the sign “$” is on it.

in our already information-laden world, consumers tend to take the path of least resistance. Expensive restaurants usually adhere to a minimalistic menu design and prices are written simply, without additional signs ($ 24, not $ 24, 00). They just want their customers to focus not on prices, but on food.

3. 10 for $ 10

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Such tricks are most often found in supermarkets - 10 boxes of cookies for 10 conventional units! This is another publicity stunt ($ 1 for $ 1), which plays on one of the simplest human traits - banal redneck. Some might call it thrifty, mildly. But whatever we call this state of mind, the trick works at 99.9%! I find it silly to buy 10 boxes of something simply because the stock and the profit are obvious! What am I going to do with 10 boxes when I don't always know where to apply one or two ?! But very often, at the time of purchase, a person simply does not think about it and his hands treacherously reach for the stock product. It's good if it's toilet paper or something that can sit for a long time and not deteriorate. Worse when it is food products …

4. Purchasing restrictions

I can talk about this point for a long time, since with my conscious childhood I managed to catch the edge of the "golden times", when branded imported boots (firm A) were issued strictly one pair per hand, and bananas in the store were sold exclusively to large families!

The same thing, just a little already under a different sauce, can be found in stores now. If you see a sign that says "No more than 5 pieces to one customer," then they want to create a sense of the product's specialness and rarity. Because it cannot be rowed in packs, because it ends quickly, there is a great demand for it and it is not known when a new batch will be delivered.

And, most interestingly, it is quite possible that before you saw this sign, you only needed one piece of this rarest item. But when you see the inscription, instead of one you buy everything 5. What if the limit really is and the product runs out?

5. Factor 9

This is one of my favorite tricks! We all learned math at school and in the classroom we were taught to abbreviate and round. And everyone should remember from the school curriculum that with 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 after the decimal point, we round up. But, for some reason, getting on sales in stores, we completely forget about it and 7, 99 is perceived by us not as almost 8 (according to the rules of mathematics), but as 7! Why is our brain so courteously and meanly deceiving us?

Prices that end in 9, 99, or 95 are called charming prices. Apparently, we are deeply rooted in the association of these numbers with discounts and better deals.

In addition, since we read the numbers from left to right, we perceive the number 7, 99 as 7, and not as 8. Especially if we throw at the price tag just a cursory glance. This is called the "left-hand sign effect" - we encode this number in our minds to a lower one even before we have time to read it.

6. Simple math

This trick is used when leaving the old price on the price tag and adding a new one with a discounted price. At the same time, the price tag "cost 10, now costs 8" will work better than the option "it was 10, now it is 7, 97". It's all about elementary mathematics. Despite the fact that in the second case the difference in price will be greater (that is, the price is cheaper), people will find the first deal more profitable simply because it is easier to calculate the difference in the first case. And again we follow the path of least resistance and avoid unnecessary headaches.

7. Font size of prices

Marketing professors at Clark University and the University of Connecticut have found that consumers perceived prices in small print better than in larger, bold ones. Very often, sellers use large fonts to attract customers and thus make a mistake! In fact, this is even more confusing, since in our minds, physical quantities are strongly associated with numerical quantities.

And I can also say that we lose control over money when we get abroad to the countries of Europe or the USA, where prices in dollars are almost always an order of magnitude less than we are used to in UAH and rubles. Therefore, in the same Duty Free, a box of mints for $ 8 seems like a very cheap treat. While in Kiev you can buy the same box for almost the same price. But looking at its price in UAH, we are in no hurry to shell out and the candies no longer seem as cheap as when they were priced at $.

And very soon New Year's and sales and Black Friday will begin. Prepare your nerves and hide wallets in secluded places - big discounts are coming;)

Photo: Martin Deutsch's