Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy

by sivers • 17 years ago

75 34 17 years ago

anuraggoel2• 17 years ago

This sounds reasonable. But I've always wondered about Amazon.com's UI strategy in the context of choice - they always show me much more crap than I am interested in: on the home page, on search result pages, on product detail pages, pretty much everywhere on their site. Right now I can see well over 30 'recommended' items on their homepage (and this is after the huge Kindle ad). Surely they've conducted A/B tests. Why don't they see the same results?

vaksel3• 17 years ago

thats not choice though, that's pretty much Amazon's equivalent of a product aisle.

anuraggoel2• 17 years ago

Fair point, but isn't the jam example also a product aisle with 24 varieties of jam? My current frontpage recommendations include around 15 laptops and 15 books - I can't possibly buy all of them - aren't they asking me to choose? If they showed me just three from each product category, and fewer categories overall, I might actually be interested in the recommendations.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

That's a good point. I think it depends on the kind of segmentation that is either implied or suggested via categories. On my amazon.com home page there are 3 energy generation gadgets (solar, wind, UPS), 1 laptop, 5 harddisks, 6 gift baskets, 6 home entertainment items, 10 kitchen utensils and 6 pieces of jewellery.

Almost all categories contain 6 or fewer items. For some reason they seem to be assuming that people buying stuff for the kitchen can handle more choice. Before I fall for some stereotype I'll stop commenting on this one ;-)

richcollins• 17 years ago

I doubt they ever tested a minimalist UI.

thorax• 17 years ago

Cool-- I had a hunch recently that some of our weekly match reports for Yumbunny (our dating site) were showing too many potential matches in the email reports we send. I envisioned some of our users getting overwhelmed by all the options.

Anyway, this article reminded me to get that rolling so instead of top 10, we're going to try top 3 and see if engagement increases. We'll see.

fallentimes• 17 years ago

You really should test that and submit your findings to HN :).

dflock• 17 years ago

Yes - sounds like an excellent candidate for an A/B split test and an enlightening follow-up post on HN!

vaksel3• 17 years ago

it seems that for most people, 5 is the most choices they can consider without getting a headache.

I think optimally you want the person to narrow it down to 3 choices, because at that point the person is a lot more likely to buy, since they are at a point where they can consider the items side by side and actually make up their mind.

patio11• 17 years ago

Here's an anecdote for you: I am generally religious about reducing the length of funnels, because length kills conversion like nothing else. This lead me to once let the customers make two choices with one click: whether they wanted download or CD of the software, and whether they wanted to pay by Paypal or Google Checkout. The four combinations were laid out in a 2x2 table.

This proved immensely confusing for people, so much so that adding a shopping cart on top of two bare "download" or "CD" buttons caused sales to rise substantially, despite the fact that the shopping cart was a virtual riot of distraction and required minimally an extra click to get through.

natch• 17 years ago

Interesting. On the 2x2 table idea, I wonder if there are any other two decisions in the conversion funnel context that could work in such a table and not be as confusing.

Erf• 17 years ago

I imagine that the confusion arose because the two dimensions which varied across the button grid had no relationship to one another.

Goladus• 17 years ago

Why the table? I can imagine being confused by something like that. I'd attempt a solution like this before using a table.

    Order a CD:
          [Google Checkout]
          [Paypal]
    Purchase a download:
          [Google Checkout]
          [Paypal]

That way, I still make the decisions in order but only click one link. The tree could be inverted and still work, but this way the label on the links match exactly where you are going.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

the profession of salesperson exists because people want their choices narrowed for them.

mlLK• 17 years ago

I was about to say something along those similar lines. . .since most customers have a hard-time rationalizing a set of choices without understanding the makeup of each choice. Most customers, in a sense, out-source the decision-making to either a salesman's pitch or a product's brand. Seems like most of marketing's job is to optimize their product according to their customer's profile, which, in short, I think means each product marginalizes their customer according to a set of values called culture.

staunch• 17 years ago

Not really the same thing, but makes me think of a behavior I've noticed in myself. Sometimes I'll decide to buy an item or two, and then browse around some more. Pretty soon my shopping cart is filled with stuff I want, but now instead of some minor spending I'm faced with a more significant purchase. I often decide to buy absolutely nothing.

If the store could encourage me to just purchase the one or two things I originally wanted they'd make more money off me.

sp332• 17 years ago

Sounds like you should be using the "wishlist" instead of the shopping cart.

callmeed• 17 years ago

Related anecdote: with our core product, customers choose a base website design/template (Flash-based) and then customize it with our cms. At one time we had around 25 designs to choose from. Some designs we thought were really slick hardly sold at all.

Recently we trimmed it down to just our best designs. Currently we are offering 9 to choose from. It hasn't been long enough to back up the article but sales are definitely stronger and there seems to be a more even distribution of chosen designs.

jeroen• 17 years ago

Barry Schwartz on how more choice makes people less satisfied: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...

thirdusername• 17 years ago

He also give a one hour talk at Google in 2006 on the same subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8R5TZNV1A

jwecker• 17 years ago

I think it may have been in this talk, but the solution when the customers actually demand the multiple choices is to do the best of both worlds- the "Greek Restaurant" - Have a menu filled with just about every dish imaginable, but then have a page in front in large print that says something like "Recommended Choices" and put the highest margin items on there. The customer feels like they _could_ choose something if they were in the mood, but they can feel good about simply ordering one of the suggested choices.

known• 17 years ago

Couple of years back I read that Google Home Page was designed in such way that it should not display more than 7 features.

Confusion• 17 years ago

Surgeon Atul Gawande found that 65% of people surveyed said if they were to get cancer, they’d want to choose their own treatment. Among people surveyed who really do have cancer, only 12% of patients want to choose their own treatment.

So, if you ask your customers if they want extensive choice, they will say they do – but they really don’t.

That's a huge non sequitur. Research on cancer treatment preference does not imply anything about 'amount of choice' preference. Not even when combined with research on 'number of sales' as dependent on 'amount of choice', because in that case no one was asked how much choice they preferred.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Maybe people who prefer fewer choices are much more likely to get cancer. ;)

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Article dating back to eight years ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/health/in-weird-math-of-ch...

tybris• 17 years ago

24 different types of jams is too much. 24 different types of books is too little.

tortilla• 17 years ago

24 different types of books on beginning HTML is still to much.

triffid• 17 years ago

That seems like a category error to me, 'jams' isn't the same type (or scope) of category as 'books'. I suppose what you're trying to say is that different categories can support different amounts of choice, but it's not at all clear to me that this is the case.

timdellinger• 17 years ago

A neologism from Douglas Coupland's 1991 book Generation X:

Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

blue1• 17 years ago

see the book "the paradox of choice" by barry schwartz. interesting read

dpcan• 17 years ago

I think he missed a big point. Lead them in with features, like they are bait, THEN only present 3 packages to buy (instead of 16). Software is different than jelly.

Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy

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