Revealed: Is online shopping a stressful task?

While online shopping comes as second nature to some, this isn’t the case for everyone. For others it can cause confusion and frustration. To investigate how people really feel about online shopping and how stressful an experience it can be, Currys completed a study that compared peoples’ responses to online shopping with that during everyday activities.

This involved surveying volunteers of various ages and tracking their heart rates while they completed a number of tasks including online shopping (unassisted), online shopping using the Currys ShopLive tool (video chat with an expert), exercising, browsing social media and completing brainteasers. You can learn about the findings below.

Online shopping gets people’s hearts racing more than social media

Volunteers’ heart rates increased by an average of 3.2 BPM while online shopping, compared with a decrease of 2.2 BPM when browsing social media
People give online shopping a stress rating of 4/10, compared with just 3/10 for social media
Women enjoy online shopping more than men, but their heart rates raised 3.4% more than men when doing so
The psychological implications of using social media are well reported, but it turns out that online shopping could be causing higher levels of stress – with heart rates raising more during the online shopping task than browsing social media platforms. Online shopping can also be compared to completing brainteasers, which received a stress rating of 4.4/10 – just marginally higher than online shopping (4).