Stop Offering Your Customers too Many Choices
January 16th, 2007 by Mike Reining Read more about Checkout Design, Conversion Rate, PopularA strange thing happens when we have too many choices: often we make no decision at all. Consumer research shows that providing too much choice will reduce sales.
In an often cited example from a psychologist at Columbia University, a display table of jams was setup at a gourmet food shop. On Day 1, six flavors were displayed; on Day 2, 30 different flavors.
Although the display of 30 flavors attracted more attention, shoppers were only one-tenth as likely to make a purchase.
Faced with multiple options — we face paralysis by analysis.
More choice = less sales.
When I’m ask to provide critiques of people’s sites one of the biggest crimes I see is the presence of too many options for a product that is unknown.
When a customer is first being introduced to your product — don’t give them 10 flippin’ options to choose from.
Don’t even give them 2 options! Point them in ONE direction.
MarketingExperiments.com recently discussed the pros and cons of having choice on a website. According to a seminar they gave in October, 2006:
Too many choices fragment a prospect’s attention. In a split test, we simplified from 3 columns to 1, the subscription process from 2 pages to 1, and reducing the number of subscription options from 3 to 2 resulted in conversion rate increasing 42% and revenues more than doubled.
Sorry folks but stop with the flippin options. When I want to buy a Mac Book, I can go to Apples site and see my 3 options upfront.
I know Apple, I trust their name. I worship Steve Jobs. Apple does not have to sell me with copy. At their website — I see my 3 choices and I pick the one I like best.
Apple lays out clearly for me. Their choices are labeled White and Black. Thank you Steve!
But when a customer visits your small business website, don’t present ANY options until they’re further down your sales copy and have learned a thing or two about your product.
When I arrive at a site like “Larry’s Handy Sprunckets” and see 3 links on the top or left menu for the:
- Basic Spruncket
- Advanced Spruncket
- Ultra Spruncket
I turn into one confused consumer. Screw you Larry. Stop wasting my time with all these options and just tell me what a darned Spruncket is!
A better way for a small business to present it’s option is to follow the format we use on this site www.SilvaUltraMindSystem.com.
We’re selling a meditation program. It requires a long piece of copy because it does not have a big brand name.
But once the visitor comes to the end of the copy…they see this:
Each option is labeled clearly.
- If you want to try this out — go for the free online course.
- If you can’t travel to a seminar, buy the home course.
- If you can attend a seminar — click here to sign up.
The description and picture help add meaning. The user is guided into one of 3 paths.…AFTER they have read long copy selling on the benefits of learning the Silva System.
Remember — less options will almost always lead to more sales.
One final example.…I want you to visit the various Internet marketing sites by well known gurus. You’ll notice that none of these guys run e-commerce super-stores selling multiple different products. Instead they build a separate site for each and every product.
Similarly, we keep two separate sites for our Conversion Tactics Book and our Adwords System Exposed Book.
Stay simple — limit choices. And keep the visitor moving down a linear path to your sale.
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
Check out other posts by Mike Reining
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Mike Reining
Vishen Lakhiani
I completely get this.
When I’m at a restaurant I’m overwhelmed with choice and it takes me ages to choose what to eat.
When I’m at home it’s baked beans, with or without toast.
I can’t help but to disagree on this one. The problem with choice is not that more of it is worse, but rather that it is, in fact, an optimization problem. I think a lot of Barry Schwartz’s ideas are often slightly misunderstood. We love choice — Western society loves to talk about ‘individualism’, and how else can you achieve that but through choice? Should your clothing store only offer a single pair of jeans? Scion’s success is purely due to choice — for the first time you could customize your car straight from the factory. Talk about a lot of choices… Too much may give you diminishing returns, but that’s not an argument for reverting back to lack of it.
Here’s the catch, and it’s something you pointed to: presentation is the source of the problem. You should not overwhelm the user with all the choices at once (many advertisers are at fault here). Let’s take the example of Apple and Dell. Apple has a small lineup of products, everything is plain and simple for them. What about Dell? Hundreds of models! However, they still have a very successful web-site because they effectively winnow the ‘product space’. First thing you do when you enter their page is choose your ‘consumer type’ (business, consumer, govt). It takes 1 click to eliminate over 60% of the options, and all of the sudden it’s a manageable search space. As a consumer I’m happy, I can customize and get the exact model I need, and Dell is happy. Now imagine what would happen if Dell put every single model on their homepage? Well, then we really do have a problem!
People love to customize; we all want to feel unique in what we buy, and what we own.
Great point!
Yes, customers love choice indeed and that is clearly the wave of the future. I think you touch on one very important point and that is presentation. If you have many options, you need to have great presentation.
In fact, the Internet is all about choice. Amazon offers far more books than any book store could ever carry and Netflix offers far more DVDs than any Blockbuster. That is the power of the long tail and there is an excellent book about the long tail that I highly recommend reading.
However, when it comes to small businesses getting started online offering more choice, more products is often what will hurt them. First, they can never compete with the bigger sites that offer even more choice and second it is much harder to nail the presentation, navigation and copy and make a site sell that offers lots of choices.
So, if you are new to the Internet and just getting started, I would strongly urge you to find your niche and own it and that means less choice.
Well, you may notice that the same principles were discovered earlier, such as KISS, website usability and such. Mentioning these and linking to site with more information could help. Unless you haven’t researched the influence of providing more resources, of course.
Simplicity is indeed important. We’re learning that lesson all the time when we launch software like BlinkList.com.
But I’m not refering to simplicity here but to creating a linear path to the sale. Some marketers call this the “most wanted response.” It means building your site to push the visitor down a singular path towards the sale.
Many sites confuse the user with unnecessary links and options BEFORE the user is sold on the product. Hence the drop in conversion.
[…] Decision theory has an interesting idea, an observation really: too much choice may cause paralysis by analysis. This same idea has also been recently popularized as ‘The Paradox of Choice‘ by Berry Schwartz. I think it’s an unfortunate name, it makes for a great eye-grabber at the store, but it is also highly misleading. Mike Reining’s article ‘Stop Offering Your Customers Too Many Choices‘ caught my eye, it fell into the ‘paradox’ trap: […]
I still disagree. New products should not limit their options solely because of ‘paradox of choice’. I elaborated about my view on my blog to make my argument a little more concrete. What do you think?
[…] Stop Offering Your Customers too Many Choices Vishen Lakhiani recommends to stay simple because providing too much choice will reduce sales (Tags: conversion rate, landing pages) […]