You will be able to set up a few small obstacles that put time between wanting something and buying it.
To cut impulse buying in shopping and delivery apps, put back a few of the steps those apps have taken away. The apps are designed so that nothing stands between wanting an item and owning it, and each step you add gives your judgement time to catch up.
A friction is one of those added steps, placed between the want and the purchase. If you truly want something, a friction won't stop you getting it. What it catches are purchases made with no real decision behind them, which tend to happen when there is nothing between wanting and buying.
Take an evening like this one. A notification arrives at 11.40pm. A flash sale has two hours left, and a voucher gives an extra 15% off if you use it before midnight. The app already has your card. You tap three times and own a S$68 jacket you never actually chose to buy.
You have four frictions to work with: time, effort, visibility of small charges, and fewer prompts to spend.
Time is the first friction, and its usual form is the waiting rule: anything unplanned has to wait a set period before you buy it. Many people use a day for small purchases and a week for bigger ones, with a money threshold that separates the two.
Wei Ling, the course's example person, draws her line at S$100. Unplanned items below S$100 wait until tomorrow, and items above S$100 wait a week. When something catches her eye, she puts it in her cart or on a wish list and shuts the app. Once the wait is over, she buys it if she still wants it and her budget has room for it.
Your threshold should suit your own budget. Someone spending S$200 a month on shopping (an example figure) would do better with S$30 than with S$100.
The wait works because most impulse urges come from the moment they appeared in: a countdown on a sale, boredom, being tired at the end of the day. Once a day has passed, a good number of those items no longer seem necessary. The ones you still want afterwards are usually genuine wants, and buying them is fine.
Effort is the second friction. A saved card turns payment into a single tap. With no card stored, you need to get your wallet out, key in the card number and the other card details the checkout asks for, then confirm the payment if your bank asks you to. MAS counts authorising online card payments as a high-risk card transaction, so your bank may add a check at this point. Ask your bank how it confirms these payments. The whole thing takes about a minute, long enough to ask yourself whether you need the item.
Start with the apps where you spend the most and remove the cards stored in them. Do the same with any payment details saved in your browser. Apps you use for planned spending, such as groceries, can keep their saved cards. You are adding a step at the points where impulse buying happens, and every other purchase can stay as quick as before.
Visibility is the third friction. Spending in tiny pieces rarely registers as spending, and the pieces add up. Small charges covers delivery fees, small-order fees, platform fees, service charges and the top-ups you make to reach free delivery, for example an extra S$5 added to the cart to clear the free-delivery threshold.
For one month, give these charges their own category. Go through your receipts or statements and tag each delivery fee, platform fee and service charge apart from the food or item it came with. At the end of the month, add up the total. One month is usually enough to show you how large the category is, so you can stop tracking after that.
Wei Ling tried this. Her month came to S$46 in delivery, small-order and platform fees, plus S$28 of extra items she had added to reach free delivery. S$46 + S$28 = S$74 in a month, and almost none of it went on anything she wanted. Seeing the total was enough for her to change how she orders. She now orders less often, puts in larger orders shared with her flatmate, or picks up on her way home.
Fewer prompts is the fourth friction. Sale emails, app notifications and promotional messages exist to start purchases you had no plan to make. Any single one is minor, yet across a week they come to dozens of nudges to spend.
Three changes cut most of them. Unsubscribe from the sale emails of shops you only buy from now and then; the unsubscribe link sits at the bottom of every marketing email, and most take two clicks. Switch off promotional notifications in your shopping and delivery apps, or move those apps off your home screen so that opening one is something you choose to do. Around the big sale days, 9.9, 11.11 and 12.12, be especially careful, since those sales depend on urgency.
Once these frictions are in place, you will still buy things, and each purchase will follow a decision you made.
Now look at your own week. Find the moments when you most often buy on impulse, and pick the two frictions that would interrupt them.
Choose two obstacles to set up this week. Write down your waiting rule for small purchases and for large ones.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).