Research conducted in early 2016 has confirmed what many may have intuitively suspected ‒ that people don’t always buy from the websites they get their information from, and that the word-of-mouth nature of social networks makes them an important part of decision-making when we shop.

Mums are getting excited about flash sales site Zulily, and it’s not hard to see why. Constant discounts, 9,000 new items posted daily and ‘buy-it-now’ emails are selling them everything from yoga pants to fridge organisers, attracting four and a half million customers in five years. Will this success last?

Only 0.6% of online shopping is driven by social media, compared to e-mail, which drives 27%. Can Facebook’s Buy button, integrated into newsfeeds, encourage people to spend more when they're on social media? And are retailers really welcome on such a personal platform?

From understanding buyers’ eye movements to measuring brain activity when we’re shopping, decision science is becoming a market research norm. Author Phil Barden sheds light on the methods and approaches used by Decode Marketing to understand why people do the things they do.