They aren’t buyin what you’re sellin.
Ever had someone come into your business and give you the dreaded “I’m just looking”? Your question to them may be the problem! In today’s episode, let’s explore what influences people to purchase!
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SOURCES Adapted from this list: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/basic-marketing-questions
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/consumer-product-research-statistics
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
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TRANSCRIPT:
So as we continue our series on the top questions in marketing, I want you to imagine for a moment you step inside a retail store because you just want to see what sorts of stuff they have inside. Immediately, a salesperson walks up to you and asks, “May I help you?”
And what’s your answer going to be? Probably something along the lines of, “No thanks, I’m just looking.”
It’s simple, polite, it tells them you’re not interested in being sold to and it establishes that if you want to buy something, you’re darn well going to do it on your terms, not them. It’s a power move. A way of setting boundaries. A nice way of saying, “get outta my face so I can just look around.”
And when you don’t buy anything and you walk out of the store, nothing’s lost. Sure, the person behind the counter was glaring at you the whole time, but you didn’t waste anyone’s time except your own, you satiated your own curiosity about what was inside and you maybe even saw a couple of things you might come back for.
Customer browsing achieved!
Now, let’s flip things around and pretend you’re the person working in the store. Sales have been slow and you’re not making your numbers for the day.
And even though you eagerly greet every customer who walks in the store, they’re content to tell you they’re not interested in talking to you and just wander around the floor, maybe just looking, maybe figuring out what they’re just going to go buy online instead, maybe even shoplifting.
What I’m describing is a situation where everybody loses. Customers aren’t being served in a way that makes them want to buy anything and retail workers aren’t making the sales they need to keep their jobs. It’s a terrible way to business, but it’s also a normal one. I’ve had this exact experience hundreds of times as a customer and a retail worker, and it’s always awkward and uncomfortable.
And guess what? There’s a better way, whether you’re talking about traditional retail, consumer packaged goods or ecommerce.
And I’m gonna clue you in on it today.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
If there’s a phrase I wish I could banish from the English language, it’s “May I help you?”.
It’s one of those phrases that sounds really nice and pleasant to say but which also is completely meaningless and even a little passive aggressive. Say it with the air of a really snooty retail associate looking down their glasses at you and you’ll hear what I mean – “May I heeelllpppp youuuuu???”
Ugh.
Why is this phrase so awful? It’s because it presumes that the only reason a customer walked into a store is because they’re waiting to be pounced on by a sales associate.
But did you know that according to a 2025 study from CapitalOne Shopping, 55% of consumers learn about new products from browsing in traditional brick and mortar stores? By comparison, only 36% learn about them from speaking to sales associates. And it’s actually the most common way for them to learn about them. For a general consumer, browsing is often not about purchasing.
It’s about exploring.
If you were exploring a new place, would you want some nosy tour guide walking around trying to direct your attention to the things they thought were worthwhile? Maybe, if you trusted them, but probably not most of the time. In fact, you’d might assume you’d probably be happiest if they told you the information you absolutely needed to know, left you alone to explore things yourself and then showed up again if you needed help or had a question.
I’m here to tell you that’s not the norm, though. I’ve observed that what people really want – and you can see some form of this in satisfaction surveys across industries for just about every category – is four things:
- They want to feel like they’re important as a customer – more important than anything else in the store!
- They want to be able to have DIY tools at their disposal so they don’t have to pester the sales staff every time they need something
- They want to feel like there’s no pressure to make a purchase until they’re ready to do so, and most really hate haggling
- They want to feel like they’re getting a great value for anything they do purchase, which includes guarantees, warranties and follow-up service
That’s it! If you master those four things, you will generally see customers who want to buy things the first time they visit and who want to come back and buy things again in the future. There are exceptions, of course. There are always going to be customers who just want to browse because they’re curious or who are seeking deals or who are just killing time or who are perhaps shopping for someone else and aren’t sure what they want to buy.
But it’s important to understand that there are ways to increase the conversion rate from potential customers to actual customers. And a lot of that has to do with making the customer feel like they ought to buy something because they’re already shopping.
Brick and mortar retailers addressed this long ago by creating shelves full of inexpensive impulse items that tend to sit near the registers or on the way towards exits to grab the attention of browsers and those waiting in line. And endcap sales, clearance racks, discount bins and time-limited promotions like Buy One Get One sales are all likewise very attractive to browsers because they tend to infuse a sense of urgency into purchasing something that otherwise may cost more later or which won’t be available to purchase.
Ecommerce is not quite as good at this when it comes to some goods because many online retailers have such a depth and breadth of inventory that only highly-sought goods tend to feel like they’re in short supply. For example, the deals with Woot! used to feel like it was offering deals that might expire at any minute, but now owner Amazon largely uses the site to dump its unsold inventory, sometimes at higher prices than you’d find on the main Amazon site.
Because there’s not a lot of transparency behind how much of something is left, it’s hard to create a feeling of scarcity and urgency unless you have a timer ticking down that says when the deals will expire or a meter showing when the limited quantity of available goods will be sold off, like Amazon does with its lightning deals – though those, too, have lost a lot of their effectiveness because consumers have gotten wise to the fact that they might just be a few pennies cheaper than the regular price.
Ecommerce promotional pricing is additionally thwarted by the fact that consumers can easily go onto price tracking database websites and see whether or not they’re actually getting a good deal and if there are other retailers offering a better one on the same product.
And brick and mortar customers can often do the same. This leads to a major issue called showrooming where customers browse to examine physical goods in a brick and mortar store and then order then product online – sometimes while they’re still in the store! – for a lower price plus delivery. And even if a retailer offers to price match, they usually won’t price match online pricing because it cuts too deeply into the margins they need to keep the store open.
So, how do you get customers who are basically mercenaries when it comes to price to actually purchase something in your store or, if you produce the product yourself, from you directly?
You offer superior service and provide a better experience.
Let me offer the example of Barnes & Noble, which is one of the last of the big box booksellers. Now, I love books, and my wife and kids and I buy them all the time. We have thousands of books in our house. But I’m also a cheapskate and I prefer to buy books used or on sale to paying full price for them because books are really, really expensive.
And books also often have an amazing markup on them because I can very easily go online and pay sometimes half the price of what Barnes & Noble is asking by purchasing from Amazon or other online retailers. And Barnes & Noble has one of the worst ecommerce websites I’ve ever had to deal with, so I tend not to order from their site even if they have a deal, which they often don’t.
Yet my family has a Barnes & Noble premium membership card and we usually spend enough in a year to make it worth our trouble. This card costs $40 a year and gives us 10% off our purchases plus some other perks. That means we’re spending over $400 a year with that retailer to feel like we’re receiving enough value to continue using that card.
So, what is Barnes & Noble doing to get us to spend that much money even though they’re rarely the cheapest or most convenient option? It’s pretty simple. They provide a nice shopping experience by offering stores filled with books we can browse, a café with a nice selection of desserts and other products like gifts and toys and board games. The employees are generally friendly, unhurried and happy to provide help if we need it, and there are often promotions, sales and clearance products for us to look at if we need to justify spending a little less on a purchase because we already have so many books at home.
The store meets all of our basic needs. We feel important as customers because the employees are helpful without pushing us to buy things we don’t want, we can pick up the books on the shelves and look them through to see if we want to buy them, and we can use the store’s DIY resources to see if particular books are in stock, pricing is transparent and discounts are easy to understand, and the services offered, like the ability to pre-order, to put books on hold via the app or to purchase food and drinks at the café, make the shopping experience more pleasant.
Could we skip the store and just order things online to be shipped to our house? Sure! But that presumes we know what we want as shoppers. Often, we walk away with things we’ve freshly discovered that we decided on the spot we wanted to buy. And sometimes, we go to the store to find a gift for someone else rather than to purchase items for ourselves. It’s much easier to do all of that in person than online.
We’re buying because we want to, not because we have to. And as marketers, I think we need to embrace the fact that so much of purchasing is not about price or features or scarcity or slick ad campaigns or anything else. It’s about making things available and within reach so that people will want to buy them in the first place.
That’s not to say price isn’t an issue worth being concerned about. If you raise the price on something, demand will almost always drop, and if you lower the price, demand will often increase. But price is merely a component of value, and customers who feel like they’re getting a higher level of value from what they purchase will pay more for it. I can tell you from experience working in retail that I often sold products for slightly more than people would pay at the Target store just a few hundred feet from where my store was sitting, and what’s more, they were happy to pay it because they felt like in supporting my store, they were getting more value for their money because our employees were more knowledgeable about the products, easier to deal with for returns and made it easier for customers to get in and out when they wanted to make a purchase.
So let’s go back to that shopping experience for a moment. If you’re operating a retail store, your number one goal should be to ensure that when a customer enters the store that you understand their mission and make it easy for them to complete it. Are they picking up an order, or looking for something specific, or just browsing, or gift hunting, or just hanging out to kill time? None of these missions require a phrase like “May I help you?”. In retail, my greeting would be something like this. “Hey, welcome! I’m Sean, and I’m here to help you if you need anything. We’ve got a great sale going on today on this endcap. Let me know if I can help you in any way!”
The customer would feel regarded, free to get to their mission and also welcome to come and bother me if they needed something. This also gave me the opportunity to see what their mission was and to utilize my sales training to find ways to open a genuine conversation with them. If they were wearing a St. Louis Cardinals hat, I’d ask if they’d been to a baseball game lately. If they looked like they might be interested in movies, I’d ask their thoughts on what was in the theaters right now. If they looked like they were coming from lunch, I’d ask their opinions on where I should go grab food on my break. If they seemed like they were just killing time, I’d ask about how traffic was or the weather was or if they’d heard the latest news about something fun and interesting.
And you can do this on ecommerce websites too, but not with conversation. The very worst idea a lot of websites have right now is to make a chatbot or chat window pop up when people have been browsing for a certain amount of time. That’s terrible. Please stop doing that.
No, the way you open a conversation on a product page is to feature reviews and links to helpful articles or guides that help to contextualize why a product might be worth purchasing. You can have recommendations for similar products and you can offer fun interactive features like previews and user photos and customization options. You make the experience interesting, the pricing transparent and the product or service easy to purchase. If it’s a product, you offer perks like free shipping or value-added items or features or guarantees to help offset the price. If it’s a service, you offer a free tier or a time-limited free trial or make it easy to schedule an appointment.
And you never, ever want to direct people to your sales team if you can avoid it because you will lose out on a lot of sales from all but the most motivated of customers. Because, again, “May I help you?” are the last words customers want to hear.
And the last words you want to hear in return are, “no thanks, I’m just looking!”
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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