How to Buy Gifts? Explore vs Exploit

Let’s get the fact straight first. Buying a gift is no easy task, especially online. With the myriad of online choices, it’s too challenging to decide what to buy, particularly when you’re on a time crunch.

This article will show how to overcome decision paralysis when options are just countless.

Explore

If you have all the time to select a gift, the best strategy to follow is to explore your options. If you have more than a month before the occasion, it would be best if you took the time to look around for that perfect present. You can distribute your search over days and weeks, and now and then, you will stumble across something that wouldn’t have been possible to find a night before the occasion. Secondly, use this time to explore what the receiver wants from you as a gift.

So, maybe start by exploring the kind of gifts you could give. Is it going to be a toy for kids, or cakes or flowers for adults? Or all of them because the kid loves cake and the adult could still use some toys? Because giving more than one gift item isn’t just a safe option but an opportunity to explore your loved ones’ tastes. And use the knowledge of their preferences to select perfect gifts in the future, even when you’re behind time.

Exploit

Talking about being late for the gift brings me to the exploit strategy, which should be used to buy gifts when you don’t have time. It makes no sense to scrape the entire internet when you only have a day to decide what to give as a gift. The plethora of options will leave you confused and hinder decision-making. 

The best is to double down on your knowledge in these scenarios. Don’t search through all the possibilities when you don’t have much time. Instead, exploit the information you have gathered during the explore phase at some point in your life and restrict yourself to the only options that you are sure would work. Exploiting will narrow down your search by many folds, and you won’t be baffled by the plethora of options online.

But what about when you didn’t have much opportunity to explore in the first place? In this case, rely on the knowledge of others. From an evolutionary perspective, following the herd saved our asses many more times than it got us killed. When you have little or no information about something, and it is an emergency, follow what others do. And in the online world, one can do this by heading straight to the best-selling section of a website.

Best-selling sections on a given website contain the items people frequently buy and are rated highest in the reviews. These items are social proof of what others are buying and trending on a particular occasion. And buying something from the best-selling section might also increase your odds of getting on track with the ongoing trends you may not know.

So, next time you’re buying a gift, don’t forget to factor in how much time you’ve got.