Why do people buy things?

The amount of work experience has a profound impact on the e-commerce industry, and the research on demand affects your experience. This article starts from demand, explains in detail the impact of demand and how to use demand, and is recommended for students who want to understand market analysis.

My understanding of e-commerce has gradually deepened over the past few years of working in it. I found that e-commerce is really an industry that requires a lot of experience. It is similar to being a chef. A chef with one or two years of experience and a chef with ten or twenty years of experience can cook dishes with the same ingredients that taste different.

What stage am I currently at in the e-commerce field? It’s hard to say. Recently, I started to study user needs. When studying user needs, a question suddenly occurred to me: Why do people buy things?

I put this question to the e-commerce group, and to my surprise, several e-commerce operators had the same idea as me, and answered: because users have demand . Some also gave other answers, such as to kill time, to show off, to spend money, etc.

Everyone has a different understanding. My view is that the reason why people buy things is that they have needs. The popular explanation is that the user currently has a problem and he needs something to solve it. Shopping is a behavior that occurs in order to solve this problem .

Just like the old saying, why do users buy electric drills? Do they like playing with electric drills? No, it’s because they want a hole in the wall so they can put a nail in and hang something. People buy things because they have needs.

1. Demand generates purchasing behavior

A few days ago, I bought a headset online. Before buying it, I had never thought about buying a headset. Why did I suddenly buy this thing? Because a few days ago, I used a computer camera to shoot a short video. From copywriting, video shooting, video editing, to publishing, the entire operation process went very smoothly. When I checked the results, I found that the sound of the video was a bit harsh.

People will not continue watching videos with such poor user experience, which will inevitably affect my video rating and then my playback volume , and I will not be able to achieve the goal of surpassing Brother Xiao Yang.

So what should I do? To solve the problem of harsh sound. I started to try various methods, using a laptop, a desktop computer, and an AU to adjust the sound. After a series of operations, I came to the conclusion that the hardware sound reception effect was not good and could not be improved.

AU can adjust the sound, but the time cost of adjusting the sound is too high, and I don’t want to waste time on adjusting the sound. So I can only seek other solutions. Through Baidu, I found the answer: use headphones to receive sound, remove noise, and receive sound perfectly.

This thing can solve the problem of harsh sound when recording videos, so I bought a headset, and later I learned that there is a better solution: a sound card. I have never heard of a sound card before, but I only discussed with everyone in the group about how to record audio, and after learning about the function of a sound card, I decided to buy this thing.

Why should I buy a sound card? Because it can make the sound better when I record videos or live broadcasts, thereby achieving the goal of increasing followers.

If I don’t have a need for it, will I buy it? For example, if a well-known brand of children’s diapers is offering a 90% discount, will you buy it?

If you don’t buy it to make a profit, you will never buy this diaper with a super high cost performance, because you don’t need it, so what do you buy it for? People will not buy products that they don’t need, no matter how cheap the price is.

Remember, there must be a need behind people's purchasing behavior, that is, the user has a problem that needs to be solved . The types of goods on e-commerce platforms are numerous and complex. But no matter whether it is as big as a car or as small as a screwdriver, as well-known as a mobile phone or as niche as a bumper, any product exists to solve a problem (need) of the user.

Demand generates purchases, purchases generate revenue, and revenue brings profits. To simplify it, demand equals profit. Whoever grasps the demand will grasp the profit.

2. Price is the amount of money required to meet demand

Once you have determined the user needs and your product is out, will you be able to get users to place orders? Not necessarily, unless you are the only one in the market with a monopoly. In order to solve a certain user need, there will be different solutions, and multiple companies will compete for users with the same solution.

For example, to solve the problem of harsh video sound, you can use software, headsets, sound cards, or even find a professional announcer. After I chose the headset solution, I had to choose the product I wanted from a variety of headset brands. In this selection process, the most critical factor is price.

Everyone who operates Pinduoduo knows that price is king. As long as the price is low, it will be easy to sell the product. Some headsets sell for more than 100 yuan, some sell for more than 50 yuan, and some sell for more than 10 yuan. The quality of products corresponding to different price points may be different, or they may be the same product.

Don't doubt it. I sell cosmetics. The price of the same product may vary by more than 10 or 20 yuan, corresponding to different target users. The products are the same, but the selling prices are different. People who know how to buy good products at low prices, and those who don't understand the market can only spend more money than others .

The same product has three price levels: medium, high and low. Don't think that if the price is high, the product will not sell. It's just that the audience of high-priced products is indeed smaller. Low prices may not necessarily be popular with all users. Anyway, if the headset is sold for 9.9 with free shipping, I will not buy it, because the quality is probably not very good.

What if the headset is sold for 299? I won't buy it either. In my opinion, the sound problem of my videos is not that serious, and I don't make a living from videos, so it's not a matter of life and death. And my understanding of headsets is that they only cost a few dozen yuan.

Thus, a phenomenon arises: when every user decides to purchase a solution (product) to solve a problem he encounters, he will have a psychological price . This price is the money he is willing to pay to solve the problem.

If the price of this solution exceeds his psychological expectation, he will most likely just give up and not solve the problem. For example, if you have a cold now, there is a special medicine that will cure the cold in ten minutes after taking it, but the price is too high, 1 million per pill. You will think that the price is too outrageous: I can get rid of my cold in two days, so forget it, I won’t buy it, I will just wait for two days to get better.

What if this user is the richest man in the world? He might be willing to spend 1 million yuan to buy this medicine just to avoid the discomfort of a cold.

3. Make products based on demand and psychological price

When doing e-commerce, you must have a deep understanding of user needs. If an e-commerce platform has 100 million users, what percentage of them have needs for sun protection, what percentage have needs for solving noise problems, and what percentage have other needs, big and small? How big will the corresponding market be, and how high will the revenue ceiling of your company's products be?

Don’t expect to achieve 10,000 orders a day for a product with very niche demand, as it is impossible.

According to user needs, a simple market analysis can be done to find out the price range and share of similar products in the market, and roughly get the user's psychological expected price, so you know how much is appropriate to sell. When you grasp both the demand and the price, you have captured your target users.

4. Final

It takes time for everyone to understand e-commerce. Just like a chef cooking, it is impossible to cook in one or two days what others have mastered for five or six years. You can only learn more, watch more, and practice more to master all the knowledge points in e-commerce operations as soon as possible.

This will make it much easier for everyone to promote products, and you will be close to being called an e-commerce expert.

Author: Tiger Talks Operations

Source: WeChat official account: "Tiger Talks about Operations (ID: laohujiangyy)"