Why do consumers make the purchase decisions they do? What inspires them to buy a specific product or service? This article covers the five stages within the consumer decision-making process. Once you understand how and why customers make decisions, you’ll know how to influence them to convert from shoppers to buyers.
What is a purchase decision?
A purchase decision is the stage in the consumer decision-making process where a customer chooses to buy a specific product or service. To influence this decision, businesses often highlight a unique selling proposition (USP) or share customer testimonials to build confidence, and offer limited-time discounts to inspire urgency.
What is the consumer decision-making process?
The consumer decision-making process, which goes by other names, including buying-decision process, the buying process, or the sales funnel, is a series of five stages customers go through to purchase a product or service.
It covers a buyer’s entire customer journey, from identifying a need to evaluating a product, service, or experience to considering options, then making a final purchase decision.
Brands use marketing strategies and tactics, such as direct marketing and influencer marketing, to influence consumer behavior.
5 stages of the purchase-decision process
- Customer-need recognition
- Initial information search
- Evaluation of alternatives
- Purchase
- Post-purchase appraisal
1. Customer-need recognition
The first step of the consumer decision-making process involves consumers identifying problems they need to solve. While often influenced by advertisements and recommendations, a customer’s need (or want) for a product or service comes from factors like physical and emotional needs.
For example, a customer might want to purchase healthy, portable snacks because they started a workout routine that requires more nutrient-dense food on the go.
Brands influence consumer behavior during this stage by positioning their products as the answer to their customers’ needs and problems.
One way to achieve this is through content marketing. By creating useful content you build trust and credibility while informing audiences. Content marketing plans include publishing informational posts on social media and blogs or sending them in emails.
For example, cookware brand Lodge Cast Iron uses its blogs to document the history of different cooking materials and teach customers how to pick the right pans. These posts help make the brand an authority in its niche, which boosts brand awareness and moves a potential customer down the conversion funnel.
Some of the ways that brands influence the buying process at this stage include ongoing brand awareness work. Branding efforts help introduce your company to someone who may not need your product or service now, but when they do—they’ll have heard of you. Or, maybe they’ve already heard of you, but only associate you with one product.
Brand marketing helps inform customers that you exist and of all that you offer. Tactics include creating compelling social media content with unique value propositions (UVPs) information about their products or services. What do they do or sell, and what makes them different from competitors?
To create engaging content, brands should spend this stage learning as much as possible about their target audience’s needs. Surveys, customer interviews, focus groups, and market research are ways for merchants to learn more about the needs of their loyal customer base.
You may also hear a customer’s need referred to as a “pain point.” As in, what’s causing them pain, or challenging them?
2. Initial information search
The second stage of the consumer decision-making process involves customers searching for information about products or services related to their needs. Customers engage with this information search stage by making search engine queries, reading online reviews, engaging with informative ads, talking with friends, or visiting a store in person.
This stage might involve search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEM is also known as paid acquisition or pay per click (PPC). These are the ads or sponsored links you often see at the top of the search results page.
To pursue organic acquisition, you’ll need an SEO strategy to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). Here’s how to get started:
Brainstorm
Start by brainstorming general topics that make sense for your brand. For example, if you run a sock brand, you might try “ankle socks” and “wool socks.” Leverage Google Analytics to see what terms people use to find your website. Google Autocomplete predictions and the “people also ask” SERP feature show you similar topics or phrases that interest people.
Use keyword tools
After you generate an initial list of keywords, use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to find relevant keywords with a low difficulty level. Optimizing content around the right keywords can help increase website traffic.
Depending on the tool you use, you can also learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which ones drive the highest percentage of traffic to their sites. These insights might influence your strategy and editorial calendar priorities.
Pick your keywords
There are a couple of ways to narrow down your keywords. You can:
- Search Google and see which sites rank for those terms and whether they align with what your business offers
- Prioritize keywords with a low difficulty level score and good monthly search volume
The search volume number depends on your business. For example, a more established brand with a higher domain authority (use Moz to check your score) might aim for something in the 5,000 to 10,000 range, while a new, smaller brand might stick to 300 to 600.
Add keywords to your site
Incorporate relevant keywords to your website, including in title tags, product descriptions, category pages, image alt text, and blog content. Aim to add keywords naturally. If it feels forced or unnatural, it might turn off readers. Overusing a search term is called “keyword stuffing” and is discouraged by Google.
Also, work on creating useful content that answers a customer’s search query. For example, if you run a dishware company and target the keyword “alternatives to plastic plates,” your content may offer a list of options, including ceramic and glass, and explain their benefits.
3. Evaluation of alternatives
The evaluation of alternatives stage involves customers weighing which product, service, or brand to choose. Consumers use the information they gathered in the previous stage to compare options and make a choice based on a variety of factors, including availability, pricing, positive and negative reviews, and brand loyalty.
Brands can influence the evaluation process in a few ways:
Provide social proof
Social proof describes buyers’ tendency to rely on the opinion of others to help them form their own. Positive customer testimonials and endorsements show potential customers the real-life application of your products and help them understand how it can fit within their lives.
Create product demonstrations
Product demos give audiences an idea of how your products work. Film videos that show your product in use and educate potential customers. Sugardoh sells supplies for sugaring, a lesser-known hair-removal technique, and its website features a “Learn” page with instructional videos.
Share user-generated content
On your social media profiles, share user-generated content (UGC) from your customers. You can tap the proof of experts in your niche and earn trust with these videos. Remember to tag the original creator.
Create an FAQ page
An FAQ page addresses audience concerns and builds brand confidence. It also increases search engine visibility, providing a place on your website for keywords and related queries.
Highlight your unique selling proposition
Your unique selling proposition (USP) answers the question: What makes you different? It shapes your marketing strategy, messaging, branding, and copywriting. Feature your USP prominently on your website and marketing materials.
4. Purchase
The fourth stage of the consumer decision-making process is the actual purchase of the product or service. Once customers gather enough information and evaluate their options, they make a final decision about what to purchase.
Interact with this purchase decision stage by optimizing the customer checkout experience. By improving this experience both in stores with an easy point-of-sale system and online using an intuitive ecommerce platform, brands can deter shopping cart abandonment and earn more sales conversions. There are a couple of ways to approach the commerce experience:
Omnichannel retail
Omnichannel retailing is a fully integrated approach, giving customers a unified experience across all channels or touchpoints, such as social media and a brand’s website. It empowers customers to make a purchase where they prefer to shop. Omnichannel retail can be more convenient for buyers and, by tapping into user data, can create more personalized customer experiences.
Shopify lets you connect your account to platforms like Instagram and Facebook and manage your inventory, orders, and customers from a single back office, helping you provide a cohesive experience across channels.
Multichannel retail
Multichannel retail similarly lets businesses reach their target audience on different channels, such as SMS and social media. However, with this approach, each individual channel might have its own marketing campaigns and goals. While customer data may not be fragmented across channels, it does let you tailor your marketing strategy to each channel’s demographics.
5. Post-purchase appraisal
The post-purchase stage involves customers evaluating their experience with a brand’s product or service after purchasing it. During this post-purchase evaluation, customers reflect on how a particular product or service met their needs and whether they’d purchase it again or recommend it to others.
This makes customers feel heard, and it also provides valuable feedback for your brand to improve your products or services.
Brands influence post-purchase behavior with strategies like customer loyalty programs, customer surveys, follow-up emails with discount codes for new products, and effective retargeting campaigns focused specifically on previous customers. Shopify features apps (like Smile and Grapevine) and native tools like Shopify Email help you connect with customers after a purchase.
Tips for influencing purchase decisions
- Gather social proof
- Understand your target audience
- Build a valuable brand
- Optimize your ecommerce store
- Choose the right pricing model
Consumers make purchase decisions based on a variety of factors. Here are a few ways that brands influence consumer behavior and help customers make a final purchase decision:
Gather social proof
Collect as much user-generated content from past customers as possible, including positive reviews, testimonials, and social media posts. You can collect reviews by searching for your brand on social media and asking for feedback (try feedback widgets and customer surveys).
You can also run social media giveaways or contests and ask participants to share a video review for a chance at the prize. Be sure to adhere to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines for endorsements. You’ll also need to comply with the laws for contests and sweepstakes, which vary from state to state and by country.
Hair care company Ceremonia uses the community rewards platform TYB to encourage customers to share UGC. In exchange for sharing, customers receive “coins” that they can then redeem for discounts.
Social proof also means ratings, such as “stars” on platforms like OpenTable, Yelp, or G2. It might be a customer satisfaction score or Net Promoter Score (NPS). Displaying customer logos or corporate names also fall into this category; just be sure to get the necessary approvals.
All of this type of content acts as social proof, which brands can use to influence consumer choice by validating their products or services with positive feedback.
Understand your target audience
To influence customers toward making a purchase requires a comprehensive understanding of your target audience. This knowledge helps you create an ideal customer profile (ICP), or a detailed, data-driven description of your most valuable customers.
Use your ICP to optimize your marketing campaigns for the audiences most likely to convert and publish content or ads that resonate with them.
Learn more about your target audience by analyzing the customer base of your competition and conducting market research through surveys or focus groups.
Build a valuable brand
A strong brand inspires customer loyalty, builds company recognition, and increases your brand equity, or the perceived value of your brand. Creating a brand identity customers recognize requires creating compelling brand assets and determining brand guidelines for your brand’s voice, tone, and visual style.
Graza is an olive oil company known for bright green packaging that helps its products stand out on kitchen countertops and in pantries.
“These micro-moments in the creator economy and in content creation are what count,” Graza founder Andrew Benin says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “These habitual moments that you see—a green cap here, a green cap there—we didn’t engineer it to be that way. We didn’t think that that would happen. But we’re reaping the benefits.”
Consistency, or the process of maintaining a company’s identity across channels, means your brand will feel familiar to customers, which can build trust. It also helps communicate your company’s core values over time.
Optimize your ecommerce store
Create a purchasing experience in your ecommerce store that makes it as easy as possible for potential customers to choose products or services and buy them. Use attractive product images, clear call-to-action buttons, and mobile-friendly designs.
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify help merchants create online stores to bring customers seamlessly through the decision-making process with features like secure checkouts, customizable themes, and automated email campaigns.
With Shopify Magic, AI drafts product copy and transforms product images to make them more compelling to your audience. Shopify’s latest theme system, Horizon, allows you to build custom theme blocks using generative AI.
Choose the right pricing model
One of the best ways that brands can move potential buyers through the consumer decision-making process toward a sale is by choosing a pricing strategy that works for their products and services.
There are several strategies:
- Values-based pricing—you set prices based on how much customers believe a product or service is worth.
- Discount pricing—you put items on sale, particularly to clear out unsold inventory.
- Competitive pricing—you use your competitors’ prices as a benchmark.
Companies choose pricing strategies for a variety of reasons, including profit margins, market demand, and revenue goals.
Whichever pricing strategy you choose, remember to keep pricing transparent upfront and include an estimate of taxes, shipping costs, and any other additional costs. Holding back on the full price of your products or services until the final purchase stage of the decision-making process can hurt your reputation and increase shopping cart abandonment.
Purchase decision FAQ
What is purchase intention and how does it affect a purchase decision?
Purchase intention, also known as buying intent, is the likelihood that a customer will purchase a product or service. Marketers use previous sales data and predictive modeling to anticipate future purchases and inform strategic decisions about pricing, product development, and product launches.
What are the main factors that influence purchase decisions?
Some of the main factors that influence purchase decisions include customer needs, social proof for a product or service, pricing, and brand loyalty.
What is the most important stage of the purchase-decision process?
All five stages of the consumer decision-making process are important, but the first stage is more so, as final purchase decisions start with customers recognizing they have a need to fulfill or a problem to solve.
