The simple trick to stop your impulse buying habit now.

The secret lies in one little button on every product page to take you from “Buy Now” to “Bye now!”

I looked back at my credit card bill for June and scratched my head at more than a few line items I didn’t remember. There was an awful lot of very specific online retail spending, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember why I’d ordered it.

In the same way that social media is gamed for attention, online retailers are gamed for conversion. They want you to buy as quickly and easily as possible: a frictionless process of a few clicks. The distance between “I wonder if I could buy…” and “Thank you for your order” has never been shorter thanks to smartphones and eCommerce innovations.

Advertising on social media has the combination of gaming your attention and knowing precisely the kind of shit you usually buy: the perfect storm for impulse purchases.

The two most dangerous words in the English language for an impatient impulse buyer like me? “Buy Now.”

Willpower is finite. I’m aware there are studies that will challenge this, but I tend to find more recognition in the studies* that say that your willpower wains over the day as you make more and more decisions. By the end of the day, if you started out not wanting, say, a beer… by happy hour you’re helpless. Retailers know this, and if you gave them notification permissions to ping you via text, on an app or via email, you can be sure it’ll happen when they know your willpower is at its weakest. ‘only 2 pairs left!’
Sound familiar?

*See: Kelly McGonigal, ‘The Willpower Instinct’

By mid-year, my wife and I were wondering how, despite having a ‘one-in, one-out’ rule for things in our apartment, we had mysteriously accumulated more stuff than we had storage for.

The rule had clearly been flouted. Something needed to change. What I did next cut my credit card bill in half.

OK, Here’s the trick:

Every time you find yourself picking up your phone or opening a browser window to impulse buy something — it could be on Amazon or any other online store —

First, pause…

Learning how to Pause will change your life. It could even be 2 seconds. But try and break the mental pathway you’re on to look up, take a breath, and become mindful of what you’re doing. Where is the compulsion coming from? Do you really need these shoes, or are you just filling a void?
Don’t you already have a similar pair? Is this just hedonic adaptation at work? Do you just want that dopamine drip that comes with ‘anticipating’ a product’s arrival and dissipates shortly thereafter?

Next, The magic button…

If you still think none of that matters, and you want these damn shoes, there is one button on every product page that will stop you from impulse buying, and it’s this one:

It’s the share button.

Every product page has one because they want people to share their products: with friends, with followers, with whomever they want to share it with. It gives their product another life outside of that page. Every online retailer that knows how the internet works has this button.

So, how do I use it to stop me impulse buying?

Simple. Every time you find your finger hovering over the big orange BUY NOW button, take a breath and move it up to the Share button.

1. Click Share, and then click on whatever email app you use to share it.*

1. Email the link to yourself. (ie. enter your own email address in the To: field.)
2. Click on “Schedule Send” (Most good email apps have this function today.)

1. Schedule the email to send the link to you in 3 days’ time, preferably in the morning when your willpower is strongest.

If the purchase is not needed within that timeframe — and let’s be honest, 99% of the time, you don’t NEED those new shoes by tomorrow — you will have a new set of eyes to view your purchase in. You’ll be able to weigh it up in the clear light of day, rationally, without the compulsion to ‘want’ and ‘have’ something, and what I have found will often happen is that when you get the email 3 days later, you forget you even sent it!

The desire was so fleeting that, had you clicked ‘BUY NOW’ you’d have a box with a new set of sneakers surprising you on Wednesday morning instead of an email from 3 days ago when you had an impulse to buy something for no good reason. Your credit card won’t have taken a hit, and you will have made a clear and cogent decision as to whether to purchase the product.

Often, you will decide that you don’t really need it after all.

If, after 3 days, you still think it’s a prudent investment, by all means, go ahead. You’ve given it the time it needed to be mulled over, and it is, by definition, no longer an ‘impulse buy.’

Can’t I just “Add to cart?” and come back to it later?

No. Here’s why:
If it is in your cart, the retailer can see that it is in your cart. Many retailers will have auto-generated emails that will be sent to you at the exact time they know you’re most likely to ‘checkout’, which is often a one or two-click process from the email. It will be something with the subject line like “Did you want to continue with your purchase of X?” or “Do you want to finish checking out?”

You don’t want that messing with you.

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Bonus points: Mindfulness meditation.

There is no better way to cultivate the ability to observe your conscious and unconscious tendencies than to build a meditation practice. If you sit awake at night on Friday disappointed at ‘where your week went’ or ‘how little you got done’, odds are your attention, your mental awareness is being controlled by external forces. That’s very common in today’s world.

The trick is to actively give yourself time away from technology, from things that can go bzzz in your pocket or bleep on your screen: Charge your phone in a different room than the one in which you sleep, close your laptop and put it in a drawer when you’re done with it, turn off your iPad when you’re done with it instead of putting it to sleep: anything to put more time and effort between you and your compulsions.

Start small. Do 2 minutes, then 5. Work your way up. Learn to observe your tendencies and see what happens to your impulse spending.

• Sometimes on Amazon, a product will have an option on the share button saying “share affiliate link” or “Share non-affiliate link” instead of giving you the option to share it directly. In that case, just copy the link and email it to yourself as schedule send.
• Yes, you could just have a refillable prepaid card that you fill with your exact budget for the month, but that becomes a little difficult to track over time.