What Moves a Person From Looking to Buying by Brendan

What Moves a Person From Looking to Buying by Brendan - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

I was selling at a small scale online, flipping whatever I could. At first it was a mess. I bought things I thought would sell, and some of them sat in my room for months. I had prices written on sticky notes. I had no idea what I actually owned, what I had paid for it, or how long anything had been sitting there.

Junior year I took Intro to Business and Computer Science in the same year. I earned an A plus in the business class and an A in programming. The business class gave me the words for what was going wrong: inventory, turnover, carrying cost. The programming class gave me something better. It gave me a way to fix it.

So I built a tool. Nothing fancy. A small piece of software that tracked everything I had listed for sale: what the item was, what I paid, when I listed it, what price I asked, and how many days it sat before it sold. Every time I listed something new, it went into the tool. Every time something sold, I logged the final price. After a few months I had a real record of my own little business, and I started asking it questions.

The question that hooked me was simple: what actually makes a listing sell? I had assumed the best items sold fastest. The data said otherwise. Some of my best finds sat for weeks while ordinary stuff moved in days. So I dug in. I compared titles, photos, prices, and the day of the week I listed. Patterns showed up. Listings with clear photos taken in daylight sold faster than the same kind of item photographed under my bedroom light. Prices I had picked because they felt right did worse than prices I set by checking what similar items had actually sold for. Items I listed on Sunday evenings moved faster than the same items listed on Tuesday mornings.

That was the experiment, and it changed how I understood both subjects I was studying. Business stopped being vocabulary words. I watched the days-since-listed count climb next to every item that would not sell, and that is when the word turnover started to mean something. In programming I finally had a tool for that. I would change one thing about how I listed, watch what happened for two weeks, and keep what worked. It was the scientific method applied to a side hustle.

But the part that surprised me most was the psychology. I am planning to major in psychology, and the data kept pointing to the buyers. Why did a listing with seven photos outsell one with three? Buyers cannot touch the item, so more photos meant more trust. Why did Sunday listings move? That is when people scroll. Every pattern I found came back to a decision made on the other side of the screen. I started reading about decision making the way I had once read about pricing, and I realized the same question runs through both subjects.

The tool I built is still just a small piece of software for online sellers. I started by asking what makes a listing sell; what the data keeps asking back is what moves a person from looking to buying. That is what I want to spend college finding out.