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A Window into the Mind of Online Shoppers
What repeat browsing reveals about how consumers make decisions.
- By
- November 03, 2026
- CBR - Marketing
When people shop online, they rarely move in a straight line. They click on one option, read a few details about the product or service, move to another option, and then almost inevitably return to something they already saw.
Most retailers that see this behavior assume the person returning to a product is trying to get back to the item they want to buy, and yet not all revisits lead to purchases. Research from University of Hong Kong’s Ivy Chu Dang, New York University’s Raluca M. Ursu, and Chicago Booth’s Pradeep K. Chintagunta explains this behavior and could help retailers’ targeting efforts.
To understand why consumers go back to products they’ve seen before, and whether those motivations influence their ultimate purchase, the researchers recruited 433 university students in Hong Kong and followed them through a realistic online shopping experience designed to uncover not only what consumers do but why they do it.
The participants browsed for a smart wristband on a custom-built shopping site created to closely resemble a typical online retailer. A product page showed 10 options, each displaying a photo, rating, and the number of reviews the item received. Clicking on a wristband opened a separate page that had more details including battery life, product features (such as whether the wristband tracked sleep, heart rate, and steps or could read incoming texts), and the reviews.
No revisits, no purchase
In a study of online shoppers, 90 percent of products eliminated from consideration were dropped without a revisit.
The researchers divided participants, at random, into two groups. A control group, 30 percent of the participants, shopped uninterrupted. The rest, the treatment group, received questions while shopping: Whenever someone in this group returned to a product they had previously viewed, a pop-up window prompted them to say why they were looking at the wristband again, and the researchers collected the answers.
Three-quarters of participants revisited at least one product, and only a small fraction of revisits were made by people who were navigating back to make a purchase or had clicked by mistake.
Rather, nearly half of revisits were made by people who wanted to compare the product with another option. About a third were made because shoppers wanted additional information, and 16 percent were due to participants having forgotten something about the product.
In the final phase of the study, the participants took a survey to say which of the 10 products they had seriously considered while shopping. On average, only 42 percent of searched products appeared in a participant’s final consideration set. Most products were eliminated quickly—about 90 percent were removed from consideration after the first search.
That said, revisits were one of the strongest signals that a product remained a serious candidate. Rather than steadily accumulate information on one product before sequentially moving to the next, shoppers engaged in a process of continual comparison, elimination, and reconsideration until making a purchase.
“Revisits are like a window into someone’s decision-making: They show not only what a person likes but also—by their absence—what a person has quietly ruled out,” Chintagunta says. “For a business, that’s gold, because a customer’s consideration set is normally invisible.”
Ivy Chu Dang, Raluca M. Ursu, and Pradeep K. Chintagunta, “Going Back to Move Forward? How Search Revisits on a Website We Built Inform Us About Search Outcomes,” Quantitative Marketing and Economics, March 2026.
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