How Do People Buy

How do people buy?

Rasmussen College

How do people buy?

Consumer behavior is “the study of when, where, and how people buy things and then dispose of them” (Tanner & Raymond, 2010, p. 37). With technology advancing everyday consumers have more choices not only with what to buy but also where to buy it. Marketing professionals study all of the different avenues people use to buy products and services in order to better provide for consumers.

In today’s world online shopping has become the third most popular Internet activity (The UCLA Internet report 2001: Surveying the digital future-year two, 2001). Website visitors typically decide whether or not they want to stay on that website within the first 8 seconds of clicking onto it. 50 percent of those visitors leave after just a glance (Understand the buyer decision making process, n.d.). After deciding whether or not to stay on the website buyers are faced with the decision making process. Most consumers typically screen a large set of products in order to identify a subset of promising alternatives that appear to meet their needs. They then evaluate the subset, perform relative comparisons based on desirable attributes and then make a purchase decision. When purchasing online, the decision making process in condensed into a two-step process: pre-purchase search and evaluation, and the actual purchase (Ha¨ubl & Trifts, 2000). As discussed, the internet is now a popular place for shopping and marketing professionals must be aware of how, and when people are buying things in this large market.

Visitor behavior is driven by how the information presented is relevant to what they are looking for. As seen previously, if a visitor to a website does not see what they are looking for within the first 8 seconds they may choose to leave that site and visit another one. It is important that marketing professionals understand this and create an online environment that is able to retrieve material that...