Over the last week I made a lot of purchases on my iPod Touch that I would never have made in any store. I can’t help but blame the twitchy finger over a simplified checkout process. The App Store for the iPod is probably the best example of impulse purchases. We have fairly low prices for things that are convenient and probably not worth a lot, and the checkout procedure has been dumbed down to a single yes or no prompt. After that it connects straight through your credit card, it activates immediately and you have your application sitting there on your device.
The worst part is that it doesn’t even stop there! You open your app and it is filled with ads, with one additional payment of maybe fifty cents, the device is unlocked to be ad free. Two months later, they may scrap the project and start again. I suppose it comes fairly cheap as most apps will total under $5, but it adds up surprisingly fast. With everything streamlined in such a fashion, customers such as myself don’t focus on the decision making process and skip straight to checkout, only post purchase do I regret buying.
It’s actually quite interesting to see that a lot of digital download services are taking this route. We have the app store for the iPod, Playstation Network for the PSP or PS3, even dedicated eReader devices will let you purchase a book at a click of a button. However, one has to wonder how this affects the quality of the goods. This tactic will only work for cheap items, which makes it significantly harder to fill the catalog with pricier premium items later on.