How you can cater to the Impulse Shopper

By Alan Saldanha, SiteServer101.Com

When you have opened an on-line store your only focus is selling the product. You do not want anything to come between the purchase process and the browser who on an impulse wants to make a purchase.

However, when a browser clicks your ad banner to make a purchase of a particular product he/she is taken to the main page of you site which distracts him from his original intention – buying the advertised product.

A better approach would be take the shopper directly to the product information and complete the purchase. If the product information is displayed in a "pop-up" window the complete purchase can take place without having lave the site of the original ad.

The following table illustrates how this could be applied. It allows you to run an ad at another Web site, and allow the shopper to make the purchase, without actually leaving the original site.

Your product ad is displayed at the site where you have taken out the ad. It need not have to be an ad, it could just be a hyperlink.

When the shopper clicks the ad, a wizard window pops up, initiating the process of making the purchase without leaving the original site.

The shopper enters the quantity, then clicks Next.

Step 2 of the wizard involves asking the shopper for shipping information as indicted in the figure to the left.

After entering the information the user clicks Next.

At step 3, the shopper enters payment information, then clicks Next.

The last step involves displaying the receipt to the shopper. When the shopper clicks Finished, the smaller window disappears leaving the shopper at the original site.