Article

6min read

The Science Behind Purchasing Anxiety

Note: This is a guest post by Anand Srinivasan, founder of Hubbion


There are dozens of concerns a prospective customer might have when they are shopping on your website.

Would the product actually do what it promises to do? Can they trust you with their credit card details? Would you actually ship the product and not run away with their money? Can your company be trusted on your shipment and return guarantees?

‘Purchasing anxiety’ is the term used to refer to these thoughts, and is many times the reason why a customer might abandon their cart midway through the buying process. Not surprisingly then, such anxieties are more common on startup and small business websites than for big retailers like Amazon. So what’s really causing this anxiety? Let us look at the science behind this.

In 2013, filmmaker and author Errol Morris, in association with the New York Times, conducted an experiment to study the link between reader perception and typefaces. His study showed that readers are more likely to agree with an essay if it were written with the Baskerville font instead of Comic Sans or Helvetica.

Purchase anxiety

It is not difficult to see why. The Baskerville font shown above demonstrates a level of authority that Comic Sans does not. If you were a buyer who is just about to spend a hundred dollars on a product, it is easy to trust a sales copy written with Baskerville over one written in Comic Sans.

Morris’ experiments are thus relevant not only for newspapers but also for eCommerce stores trying to persuade visitors to buy their products. Sometimes, even seemingly trivial elements like the font or your brand name can have an impact on the way visitors engage with your website. This is because such elements influence your perception of the product and the brand. A brand that does not exude credibility often sees their ecommerce conversions go down.

Even seemingly trivial elements like the font or your brand name can have an impact on the way visitors engage with your website.

But before we look at ways to bring a visitors’ anxiety down, it is important to know what makes them convert in the first place.

Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford University coined what is now known as the Fogg Behavior Model (FBM). According to this theory, the trigger for any behavior comes from three specific elements – Motivation, Ability, and Trigger (B=mat).

Fogg Behavior Model (FBM)

Applying the FBM theory to eCommerce conversions, you can say that for conversion to happen, the prospective buyer must have sufficient motivation, ability and must be exposed to the right trigger. Your motivation to buy a gift for your spouse, for instance, dramatically increases when you get closer to their birthday. At the same time, no amount of motivation is enough to gift your husband his favorite car if you cannot afford it. The trigger to convert can come in the form of a rightly worded ad copy or CTA.

A highly motivated visitor who is exposed to the right triggers and has the ability to buy could convert even if you do not demonstrate adequate trustworthiness. This is the reason why a lot of scams still work – people who fall for the ‘get rich quick’ schemes are sufficiently motivated and do not stop due to their purchasing anxieties. That is however not true for regular product purchases where there are dozens of rival stores vying for the customer’s attention. Conversion in these cases only happens if the store demonstrates adequate credibility to reassure potential customers.

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Elvira Aletta, anxiety thrives on ignorance. By educating a prospective customer and addressing their concerns, you help fend off the anxiety that they may have before placing an order. The bad news, however, is that there is no foolproof method to fend off all kinds of purchasing anxieties. It depends to a great extent on your industry, the products you sell, the pricing and the buyer in question.

Product Details

A buyer deserves to know everything about the product, not just the advertised claims. This means that in addition to providing the complete specifications and details about the product, you should also include feedback and reviews from other customers and any third party product ratings. If you are an apparel store, you may also encourage past customers to share pictures of them wearing these accessories – this further helps a prospective buyer with their purchasing decision and brings their anxiety levels down.

Pricing And Shipping Details

The one thing that holds a customer back even after they are convinced about the quality of the product is the price. This, of course, does not apply to all businesses and some industries are more price-elastic than the others. Convincing customers that they are indeed getting a good deal is thus paramount for some stores. There are a couple of ways to do this – you could either offer a discount coupon to reduce sticker shock or you could make shipping free. It is a good idea to have a dedicated shipping page where you explicitly mention the shipping options, cost of shipping, shipment duration, handling time and restrictions. No matter what you do, make sure that the customer is not made to pay more than what they think they would be paying.

Business Details

The other most important thing that worries a buyer is your business credibility. Many online stores regard pages like ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’ as a mere after-thought. In reality, though, a lot of visitors look these pages up to assess your business credibility. A good ‘About Us’ page should include your company history, photos, and profile of your team members and well-made visuals to highlight your business achievements, clientele and so on. Do not make the mistake of merely including a web form in your ‘Contact’ page. Make it a point to offer multiple channels of communication (like email, snail mail, phone support, and so on). This demonstrates that you are here to stay and are not going to run away with the customers’ money.

Author Bio: Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a free project management tool for small businesses. Hubbion has been ranked in the top 20 in its category by Capterra.

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

bloc Newsletter EN

We will process and store your personal data to send you communications as described in our  Privacy Policy.

Article

4min read

The Pros and Cons of Multivariate Tests

Wait! New to multivariate testing? If so, we recommend you first read our article, Multivariate Testing: All you need to know about multivariate testing


During an A/B test, you must only modify one element at a time (for example, the wording of an action button) to be able to determine the impact. If you simultaneously change this button’s wording and color (for example, a blue “Buy” button vs. red “Purchase” button) and see an improvement, how do you know which of the wording or the color changes really contributed to this result? The contribution of one may be negligible, or the two may have contributed equally.

The benefits of multivariate tests

A multivariate test aims to answer this question. With this type of experiment, you test a hypothesis for which several variables are modified and determine which is the best combination of all possible ones. If you change two variables and each has three possibilities, you have nine combinations between which to decide (number of variants of the first variable X number of possibilities of the second).

Multivariate testing has three benefits:

  • avoid having to conduct several A/B tests one after the other, saving you time since we can look at a multivariate test as several A/B tests conducted simultaneously on the same page,
  • determine the contribution of each variable to the measured gains,
  • measure the interaction effects between several supposedly independent elements (for example, page title and visual illustration).

Types of multivariate tests

There are two major methods for conducting multivariate tests:

  • Full Factorial“: this is the method that is usually referred to as multivariate testing. With this method, all combinations of variables are designed and tested on an equal part of your traffic. If you test two variants for one element and three variants for another, each of the six combinations will be assigned to 16.66% of your traffic.
  • Fractional Factorial“: as its name suggests, only a fraction of all combinations is actually subjected to your traffic. The conversion rate of untested combinations is statistically deduced based on that of those actually tested. This method has the disadvantage of being less precise but requires less traffic.

While multivariate testing seems to be a panacea, you should be aware of several limitations that, in practice, limit its appeal in specific cases.

Limits of multivariate tests

The first limit concerns the volume of visitors to subject to your test to obtain usable results. By multiplying the number of variables and possibilities tested, you can quickly reach a significant number of combinations. The sample assigned to each combination will be reduced mechanically. Where, for a typical A/B test, you are allocating 50% of your traffic to the original and the variant, you are only allocating 5, 10, or 15% of your traffic to each combination in a multivariate test. In practice, this often translates into longer tests and an inability to achieve the statistical reliability needed for decision-making. This is especially true if you are testing deeper pages with lower traffic, which is often the case if you test command tunnels or landing pages for traffic acquisition campaigns.

The second disadvantage is related to the way the multivariate test is brought into consideration. In some cases, it is the result of an admission of weakness: users do not know exactly what to test and think that by testing several things at once, they will find something to use. We often find small modifications at work in these tests. A/B testing, on the other hand, imposes greater rigor and better identification of test hypotheses, which generally leads to more creative tests supported by data and with better results.

The third disadvantage is related to complexity. Conducting an A/B test is much simpler, especially in the analysis of the results. You do not need to perform complex mental gymnastics to try to understand why one element interacts positively with another in one case and not in another. Keeping a process simple and fast to execute allows you to be more confident and quickly iterate your optimization ideas.

Conclusion

While multivariate tests are attractive on paper, note that carrying out tests for too long only to obtain weak statistical reliability can make them a less attractive option in some cases. In order to obtain actionable results that can be quickly identified, in 90% of cases, it is better to stick to traditional A/B tests (or A/B/C/D). This is the ratio found among our customers, including those with an audience of hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors. The remaining 10% of tests are better reserved for fine-tuning when you are comfortable with the testing practice, have achieved significant gains through your A/B tests, and are looking to exceed certain conversion thresholds or to gain a few increments.

Finally, it is always helpful to remember that, more than the type of test (A/B vs. multivariate), it is the quality of your hypotheses – and by extension that of your work of understanding conversion problems – which will be the determining factor in getting boosts and convincing results from your testing activity.