I was talking to a traditional apparels retailer recently. He runs a large store in a tier-3 city. He recently changed the interiors of his store. The western style chairs were replaced with the Indian style seating, that requires you to remove your footwear and sitdown on a Gaddi (cushion on the floor). He reports the conversion rates are now almost 100%, earlier at about 80%. The casual window shopper is almost NIL. He believes the inertia against getting up, putting on the shoes and leaving without a purchase is high, hence the low bounce rate. But what about the inertia of removing the footwear and sitting down? Well, he says, “The cost of entertaining a customer is very high, you have to employ more staff for lesser chances of conversion. A genuine buyer will take the pain of settling down.” By making the efforts of sitting down the customer has already invested in the deal.
Last week, I wanted to get a phone repaired. The case was complicated, neighborhood service centers couldn’t solve it. I put up an ad on Sulekha, got a call from this one store that was 12KMs away, but he wouldn’t give me the exact quote on phone. He needed to “see” the phone to give the exact price. Since his was the only call that sounded confident enough of fixing it, I drove 12KMs. He saw the phone and quoted Rs.100 more than the upper limit he said on the phone. Did I pay him? Yes. I had already invested in this deal by traveling across half the city, I wouldn’t want that to be a sunk cost. Was he cheating? NO. He never committed anything on phone.
Let’s see some online examples: The secret to Freecharge’s (very) high coupon redemption rate is the Rs.10 “courier cost”. That Rs.10 doesn’t really pay up for the courier but by paying something for the coupon the user has invested in it, hence higher chances of him using it. It’s true that lesser people would order coupons because of this Rs.10 cost but in coupons business the only metrics that should matter is the redemption rate and that’s what the focus was.
The Amazon’s way of establishing inertia is Amazon Prime, the free 2-day shipping that you invested in by paying annually. $79 may be too much to invest for shipping but once done, one will spend more with Amazon to make it sound like a smart investment. Amazon is offering products with low marginal cost like movie streaming etc. to increase the purchase of Prime.
What are other equivalent of this inertia builder in the online world? How do you make the user invest in the deal before making the transaction? How do you make the user drive up your key metrics? Isn’t this required more for online world where travelling between shops is only a matter of click?
One example that comes to my mind is “add to cart to see final price?” that a lot of sites do. Although that feature was born of regulatory issues but can it be applied to the stores advantage? Like, “Add to cart and also enter credit card details” to see final price? I remember Via.com showed ‘price after applying coupon’ only when you have filled in your mobile number and email address. Is that enough inertia buildup? Is there something more that can be done?
