Facebook is testing out a way for you to go showing while scrolling down your newsfeed. When a customer clicks the buy button inside the ad, the entire transaction will be handled inside of Facebook. Does this remind you of something? Amazon’s convenient ‘one click to buy’ is the epitome of the easiest transactions in the world for a buyer! You literally don’t have to do much to buy something – it’s like 3 clicks and you are done!

Facebook is just testing this out right now and rolling it out to a few small business in the US so it’s not something we can really draw a conclusion yet if it will work as well as Amazon’s buying process.

Twitter is also in this “easy purchasing game” – where you can put certain hashtags like #amazoncart and that item gets put into the your Amazon shopping cart. Twitter just acquired CardSpring, a company that links up credit cards with applications for mobile shopping. So the idea of making purchases easier as we are looking at funny videos and shooting the sh*t with our friends is going to be more of a common theme of social media sites.

Jumping On The Impulse Buying Bandwagon

As marketers, how can we take advantage of getting people to take us up on our offers and act impulsively like they HAVE TO HAVE what we are selling RIGHT NOW? 

2 Strategies to Implement To Get People Closer To Pressing Buy NOW

The idea behind getting people to buy right now instead of putting it off is to make it tough for them to resist. Make them feel like they are missing out if they don’t buy right away.

Here’s what to do:

1) The Discount Strategy: A driving force behind buying and impulse buying specifically is the money many of us desire to save. The fear of missing out on a deal and having to pay more later is one of the scariest feelings for someone in your target market! Having an On Sale Sign, or a slashed out higher price can make people click the buy button pretty fast.

2) The Scarcity Strategy: Scarcity works like a charm to get people to buy impulsively. The thought of the item not being available tomorrow or even later that day because everyone else is jumping on the deal is another scary feeling for buyers. Scarcity can be used in the number of items you are actually selling and in a specific time frame. Giving buyers an end time and actually sticking to that end time is important for this tactic to work.

These methods that retail stores use can apply to marketing online as well.

The Social Impulse Buy Challenge

The challenge that even Facebook itself struggles with is getting people in the buying mode when they are being social. People don’t go on social media sites to buy….just like people don’t go on Amazon to be social. People go on Amazon to BUY. So as marketers, we need to find a way to bridge that gap.  This is why sending people directly to a buy button from social media sometimes isn’t always the best strategy. It works better to ‘warm them up’ and send them to something of value before you get them to pull out their wallets. The only way to really know if it works in your market is to test!

=> Let’s hear from you? What are your thoughts on getting people to push that buy button quicker and how do you think this will pan out with social media?