Are you an Internet discount hunter?

People buy over the Internet for many different reasons. For some it is pure convenience; it is far easier to go online, spend a few moments picking the best deal and have the required goods delivered the following day van to drive to the shops, find somewhere to park and then search for a shop which may or may not have the goods in stock. Many people it is an impulse matter; they are searching for something entirely different, spot what they feel to be a bargain and after a few clicks and the typing in of credit card details the product is bought and probably forgotten about until it is actually delivered. A growing number of us believe that we get better service online; we don't have to do battle with a half trained sales assistant who is more interested in preening before the nearest mirror than actually serving a customer and if the product in question has to be delivered rather than collected it is no contest, Internet deliverers almost invariably win hands down. To add to the woes of the retailers broadband speeds are getting faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper; the majority of homes are now connected to the World Wide Web and we have a whole new generation of web savvy purchasers who know a good discount when they see one!

One of the noticeable trends in the recession has been the rise of the discount voucher sites. Consumers seek out these vouchers which offer discounts on branded goods and the rise of the number of websites offering this type of service has been very considerable with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of products sold; whether or not this is a long-term trend or whether the manufacturers will sooner or later realise that fewer and fewer people are buying at full price remains to be seen! Nevertheless the intense level of competition on the Internet, where it is child's play to gather a whole pile of competitive quotes in a very short time, will no doubt ensure that some form of discounting will survive.

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Web site design has become a vital part of a marketing structure. Research has shown that more than half of products which are placed in Internet shopping baskets are never purchased and the sale is abandoned; this represents billions of pounds worth of sales annually and so anything which will encourage these prospective buyers to actually go ahead and complete the purchase could potentially be worth a small fortune to the website operators. The very nature of a website makes it extremely easy to gather data on the purchasing procedures that prospective buyers follow as they go through the buying process and often only small tweaks to the system can yield substantial results in the form of additional sales.

If questioned the majority of people who actually buy online say they do so because they are getting the product at the lowest possible price but this is not necessarily the case. A recent international survey has shown that around 60% of products which have been bought online could have been bought off line for the same or even lower prices, indicating that a large proportion of buyers are motivated as much by convenience as they are by saving money.