Does online shopping changes the buying behavior

@jeffnolan sent the above tweet about placing more orders than last year on amazon. This prompted me to look at my order history as I was sure I would be in the same boat. Going through the order history confirmed it. Now two consumers from the same geographic region don’t make a trend. But I suspect that this would be the case for a lot more people who are voracious consumer of information on the web i.e. heavy users of blogs, tweets and online news. Increase in spend in itself is not bad if it has merely shifted spending at brick and mortar to online spending for stuff. It would be bad ( at least for my pocket) if this 24/7 connectivity, 1000s of review sites, ease of online ordering has increased our wants and buying behavior.

While buying clothes and food etc is not practical but buying gadgets, books, music, games and software etc is super easy. There is always a new batch of TVs with more features, digital cameras with HD video recording, AV receiver with newer version of HDMI, new notebooks, routers with wifi-n, ipads and iphones. Then there are techmeme, gizmodo, engadget, amazon etc to review it. For more hardcore guys there is dpreview and avsforum. And all of this in your smart phone, connected TV 24/7 at your service. I think all of this creates a never ending anxiety to upgrade stuff. Which is resulting in ever increasing line items in things-I-bought-last-winter list.

Good or bad depends up the age old question about wants and needs. So far I have started going the route of giving useful age in years to various things electronics e.g. TV, notebook at least 5 years, phone 2 years, computer stuff at least 3 years etc.  Will be watching my behavior :)

24. April 2010 by pankaj
Categories: Digital Life | 1 comment

One Comment

  1. jeff nolan says April 24, 2010 at 2:59 pm

    Nice followup to my tweet… IMO Amazon is becoming like Walmart, which not only grows market share in the categories they are already in but relentlessly expands into new categories through direct handling of inventory or through affiliate relationships.

    I am spending more money on Amazon and it is largely coming at the expense of other online merchants who 1) don’t offer the stunning convenience that Amazon has, 2) are not price competitive (Amazon is not always the least expensive but always in the leader pack and with Prime usually have an advantage), and 3) don’t have the stellar customer support that Amazon offers. However, I believe I am increasing my overall spend because many more purchases rise to the level of being an impulse buy on Amazon.

    I still wish they offered some good analytics to see what, where, and how I am spending my money on.