Stop impulse buying — why the ‘buy’ button wins and how to put the brakes on it

Stopping impulse buying is less about self-discipline and more about creating a time lag between the urge and the purchase. An impulse buy is a sudden, strong urge to buy something straight away, and online shopping is designed so that this urge has time to turn into a purchase before you’ve had a chance to think. Three things help the most: a fixed waiting period before buying, deleting saved card details, and unsubscribing from offers. The rest of the article explains why.

The urge is sudden, and that’s the point

As early as the 1980s, consumer researcher Dennis Rook described the impulse buy as a sudden, powerful and persistent urge to buy something immediately — often accompanied by a feeling that it is difficult to resist, and sometimes by a guilty conscience afterwards. The key word is ‘immediately’. The urge has a short window of opportunity. If you wait, in most cases it will subside of its own accord.

It’s the same pattern as with all impulsive behaviour: a strong desire that rises and then falls if you don’t act on it. Anyone who has learnt to manage urges and desires will recognise this curve. The difference with shopping is that the shop has done everything it can to ensure you act before the curve has time to turn.

The shop is designed to make you buy now

Mathur and his colleagues analysed thousands of shopping websites and identified what they call manipulative design patterns. They found the same tricks time and time again: countdown clocks indicating that the offer is about to end, messages stating that only a few items remain, add-ons that are already pre-selected, and notifications that others have just bought the same item.

Each of these tactics serves the same purpose: to shorten the time between the urge and the purchase. That is why it is wrong to view impulse buying as a character flaw. You are not succumbing to your own weakness. You are resisting a system that has been built and tested to capitalise on that very moment.

Three effective ways to slow down

A fixed waiting period. Decide in advance that anything that isn’t food or a necessity must wait a certain number of days – many people choose two. Add it to your basket or a wish list and walk away. If you still want it once the time’s up, buy it. The point isn’t to ban purchases, but to ensure the decision is made after the craving has passed, not whilst you’re in the thick of it. The rule is based on common sense, underpinned by an understanding of how cravings work, not a treatment tested in studies. But it’s cheap to try.

Delete your saved cards. A purchase that takes a single click happens before you’ve had time to think. A purchase that requires you to fetch your wallet and enter sixteen digits gives you thirty seconds to change your mind. Delete saved card details from your browser and apps, and log out of online shops.

Turn off the tap. Unsubscribe from newsletters, switch off notifications from shopping apps and stop following brands on social media. These channels exist to create a craving that wasn’t there before. You don’t have to resist a purchase you never felt the urge to make in the first place.

Plan for the moment when it happens anyway

You’ll end up in front of the ‘buy’ button anyway, one evening when you’re tired or bored. Prepare your response with an ‘if-then’ plan – a technique that Peter Gollwitzer and others have shown helps people actually do what they’ve decided to do: if I’m about to buy something I hadn’t planned, then I’ll add it to my wish list and close the app.

The plan works because the decision has already been made. You don’t need to reason with yourself in the moment; just stick to what you decided when you were calm. The same technique helps with all kinds of impulses — read more about why in the article on poor impulse control in adults.

When it’s more than just a habit

For most people, impulse buying is a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. For some, it’s something more serious: purchases that lead to debt, that are hidden from others, or that feel impossible to stop even though they’re harmful. In that case, simply waiting isn’t enough. Take it seriously and speak to a healthcare professional or a budget and debt counsellor in your local authority — it’s more common than you might think, and help is available.

For everyone else, this is one of the clearest examples of how impulse control can be practised: not by becoming a different person, but by creating an environment where the urge has time to subside.

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Zenith Protocol is a 30-day impulse control programme, featuring a button to press when the urge strikes and twelve short exercises to choose from. It’s free to get started.