Do the candy at the supermarket register tempt you? Or perhaps you buy one of those cheap on-sale dvds’  on your way to the register?

Perhaps you are one of the many impulse shoppers that daily keep the online stores alive.

I know impulse shopping it alive in our home. My wife is on maternity leave, so it comes very easy to her. One of her favourite stores, trendybaby.dk, asked their 346 most loyal customers about impulse shopping. 39% of the users are “victims” of impulse shopping.

So why are people impulse shopping on the internet? You can browse the store, but you can’t feel the item or get a sense of it’s quality. Perhaps it’s not the right size for your?

What are the online stores doing to deal with these challenges?

I’ve seen a lot of successful online stores that asks their customers what they want. Dialog is a great way to uncover the needs of your customers.

From time to time my wife gets invited to join their customer panel. It’s a brilliant concept. For a few hundred dollars the store will know exactly what their customers want.

One of the recent panel results show that 37% of the customers, went straight to the store right after they received one newsletter. The analysis also showed that only 1% went to the store after seeing a banner ad or other kind of online advertising.

If an online stores want to succeed, they have to give their customers some kind of experience when they do their online shopping. We aren’t interested in static and boring online shops. Take a look the Lego Online Store. Lego has managed to make the gap between the real world Lego store and online store as small as possible, without ruining it with too many complex options.

I can refer to the post I wrote the other day about online advertising, if you want to succeed you have to use your customer. Let the customer test your product before you put it in your store. Let them tell you what kind of colour, model or product they like. We all like free stuff and it’s an easy way to promote your products.

Amazon.com is probably the best example of a store that knows the concept of impulse shopping.

Do you know other stores?

Do you impulse shop? Are you a part of a customer panel?