• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, May 28, 2019

Just how short do we want the path to purchase to be, anyway?

A few weeks back, MediaPost reporter Laurie Sullivan brought this question up in her article detailing how Instagram is building ecommerce into its app. While Instagram is not usually considered a search platform, Sullivan muses on the connecting of two dots that seem destined to be joined: search and purchase. But is that a destiny users can “buy into”?

Again, this is one of those questions where the answer is always “it depends.”  And there are at least a few variables in this case.

The first is whether our perspective is as a marketer or a consumer. Marketers always want the path to purchase to be as short as possible. When we have that hat on, we won’t be fully satisfied until the package hits our front step about the same time we first get the first mental inkling to buy.

Amazon has done the most to truncate the path to purchase. Marketers look longingly at the company's one-click ordering path, requiring mere seconds and a single click to go from search to successful fulfillment. If only all purchases were this streamlined, the marketer in us muses.

But if we’re leading our double life as a consumer, there is a second “It depends…”  And that is dependent on what our shopping intentions are. There are times when we, as consumers, also want the fastest possible path to purchase. But that’s not true all the time.

Back when I was looking at purchase behaviors in the B2B world, I found variables that led to different intentions on the part of the buyer. Essentially, it boils down to the degree of risk and reward in the purchase itself. I first wrote about this almost a decade ago now.

If there’s a fairly high degree of risk inherent in the purchase itself, the last thing we want is a frictionless path to purchase. These are what we call high-consideration purchases.

We want to take our time here, feeling that we’ve considered all the options. One-click ordering scares the bejeezus out of us.

Let’s go back to the Amazon example. Today, Amazon is the default search engine of choice for product searches, outpacing Google by a margin rapidly approaching double digits.

But this is not really an apples-to-apples comparison. We have to factor in the deliberate intention of the user. We go to Amazon to buy, so a faster path to purchase is appropriate. We go to Google to consider. And for reasons I’ll get into soon, we would be less accepting of a “buy” button there.

The buying paths we would typically take in a social platform like Instagram are probably not that high risk, so a fast path to purchase might be fine. But there’s another factor that we need to consider when shortening the path to purchase -- or buiding a path in the first place -- in what has traditionally been considered a discovery platform. Let’s call it a mixing of motives.

Google has been dancing around a shorter path to purchase for years now. As Sullivan said in her article, “Search engines have strength in what's known as discovery shopping, but completing the transaction has never been a strong point -- mainly because brands decline to give up the ownership of the data.”

Data ownership is one thing, but even if the data were available, including a “buy now” button in search results can also lead to user trust issues. For many purchases, we need to feel that our discovery engine has no financial motive in the ordering of its search results. Of course this is a fallacy we build in our own minds. There is always a financial motive in the ordering of search results. But as long as it’s not overt, we can trick ourselves into living with it. A “buy now” button makes it overt.

This problem of mixed motives is not just a problem of user perception. It also can lead publishers down a path that leaves objectivity behind and pursues higher profits ahead.

One example is TripAdvisor. Some years ago, it made the corporate decision to parlay its strong position as a travel experience discovery platform into an instant booking platform. In the beginning, it separated this booking experience onto its own platform under the brand Viator. Today, the booking experience has been folded into the main TripAdvisor results, and -- more disturbingly -- is now the default search order. Every result at the top of the page has a “Book Now” button.

Speaking as a sample of one, I trust TripAdvisor a lot less than I used to.