Jeff Jochum's Blog   Unreasonable Thoughts from a Reasonable Man

When asked, customers will usually tell you that they’d like “more choices” as something that would motivate them to “buy more.” On the surface, that logic sounds right. It ain’t. Did you know that the more choices you have on your website, the more business you are losing?

Its a well-documented behavior that when you give people too many choices, they just stop buying. Its called, “Choice paralysis” (a malady closely related to the business’ disease, Paralysis-by-analysis) and is a well-known behavior in marketing. If you wish to see this phenomenon at work, you can test it by doing these things on your business website (caveat: this will also be at the cost of losing customers, so think twice):

• Have a half-dozen (or more) shoot packages and/or products.
• Add 5 ways to customize each one (books, prints, canvases, videos, etc.)
• Subdivide all of these into multiple levels of subcategories
• Pour fuel on the confusion fire with a bunch of complex discounts and specials

By doing these things, you are pretty much guaranteed to have terrible conversion rates from prospects finding your site. Ironically, if you already are doing some or all of these things on your current website, its probably as a result of your belief (and sometimes even suggestions by customers) that they couldn’t “find what they wanted” – so you kept adding options in an attempt to give it to them.

In this particular instance, Customers Lie. In fact, regardless of what they tell you, the science is unambiguous: Reducing options will increase positive results.

In one university experiment a few years back, it was discovered that approximately 1 in 5 (~20%) people can’t choose between TWO equally valuable choices. Amazingly, further testing revealed that 1 in 3 (~33%) couldn’t choose between THREE choices. The more options, the more indecision.

So, how do you stop the madness? Here a four ways to try…

1. Make every choice clearly different. A powerful way to do this is to stick to simple descriptions that have clear, unique differentiators. If you are differentiating by price levels, try to ensure that at least half of the items in each “package” aren’t repeated from one to the next.

2. Stick to 3 or 4 distinct choices. Choice paralysis is not just something suffered by those who arrive undecided. It can actually prevent a committed buyer from placing an order. Although this is a scary, the answer is obvious: reduce your range of choices.

3. Suggest the “best” choice. When faced with a set of choices, you can help your customers by encouraging them to make a decision by suggesting a course of action. This well known technique is used by most of the e-commerce websites in the form of ‘most popular’ or ‘staff favorites’. And, while these suggestions can help alleviate choice paralysis, they don’t connect with users on an emotional level. You can offset some of this loss by personalizing the suggestions, I.e. ‘Jeff’s Choices’ or ‘Designed for the Edgy Bride’.

Although suggestions are a useful way of easing choice paralysis, sometimes it is possible to avoid asking users to make a choice at all. That is where the “choice-less” solution comes in.

4. Remove choice. The best way to avoid choice paralysis is to avoid choice entirely. It is surprising how often we ask our customers to make decisions where we could easily do it for them. We tend to pass the responsibility of choice to them for a couple reasons:

Mostly, we become obsessed with the “missed opportunities.” Even though we know the majority of customers will make one choice, we worry about the minority who might want something different. As I’ve said in a previous video post, Choosing is Hard – mostly because it means NOT choosing everything else. The resulting problem with this is that the user experience of the majority often suffers in order to cater for the whims of the minority.

Also, as I mentioned at the top of this post, we mistakenly believe that customers want choice because that is what they said they want. Unfortunately, research shows there is a gap between what people say they want and what actually makes them happy about their decisions. While giving the customer choices may make them feel temporarily powerful, ultimately they are more likely to suffer from confusion anxiety and buyer’s remorse.

So what is the best solution? Suggest (as personally as you can) the most common choice while offering some level of customization – even if the details must remain undefined until they choose it.

Well thought-out and personalized choice suggestions have the power to reduce customer anxiety while not taking away the choices available to them.

How many choices do you have on your site now? 3? 4? more? Do you subscribe to the “triple cheeseburger effect” or maybe an aspiration model? Are your customers liars, too?

jeff

P.S. I have some PhotoBiz Clarity workshops coming up if you are interested (HI, MD, FLA, CA, TN) and you can usually find them here: http://workshops.startup-strategy.net

P.P.S. Did You Know?… I’ve been writing a book about liars I’ve worked with, and for, over the last 20 years?  It’s titled The Truth About Liars and I’ll do a blog post about it in the near future.  Juicy stuff! Stay tuned. :)