Could offering your customers less choice increase your sales?
We know from split testing landing pages and best practices that reducing the number of choices and distractions increase conversions. Can the same be said for the number of products displayed on pages or your navigation within your ecommerce site?
Fewer choices has shown a 1000% increase in sales
Over the past 50 years customer research has demostrated that giving your customers less choice will increase sales. A good example of this is a research paper called 'When Choice is De-motivating', written by Professor Sheena Lyengar, who has been studying for consumer behaviour and choice for over 10 years.
One of her most cited experiments is the free jam tasting booth, which was set up in a grocery store.
In the first phase of the experiment 6 different jams were available to taste. 40% of the customers walking past stopped to taste the jams and 30% of the tasters went on to buy one or more of the jams.
In the second phase, the tasting booth gave customers the choice of 24 different jams. This time, 60% of the customers who walked past stopped to taste but only 3% went on to purchase.
Over the whole experiment customers tasted 1.5 jams on average so the huge different sales for the second phase cannot be blamed on the participants being full!
This one experiment concluded that:
1. We are attracted to more choice (40% vs 60%)
2. We are 10 times less likely to buy if we have too much choice (30% vs 3%)
What this means for your ecommerce site:
1. More choice increases average time on site, means more page views and a lower bounce rate but low sales
2. Less choice lowers the average time on site, means less page views and higher bounce rate but 10 times more sales
Wait, don't start deleting products
As an online store owner the more sales the better and you'll do almost anything to achieve that. Deleting some of the products probably isn't the right thing to do. I think this kind of research is great and can used to help you increase conversion rates, but it should never be taken as absolute. For those of us that carry out conversion testing, we all know what works for one site doesn't necessarily work for another.
Good examples of these differences can be seen with Apple. Apple has cut out nearly all choice when choosing a new Mac Book Pro; there are nine choices spread over five products. Then they go to the other extreme in their ITunes store, where they are trying to sell the long tail. Both of these models work extremely well and show how both ends of the spectrum can work.
The main thing to take away from this research is you need to ensure you don't overwhelm your customers.
Hang on a minute, could this research be wrong?
Whilst writing this post I came across another interesting piece of research which was released last month (Janurary 2010) and completely dismisses the above. The research called 'Can There Ever be Too Many Options' was carried out by Benjamin Scheibehenne and claims to wipe out the last 50 years of research that proves less is more!
Regardless of the new findings, I would still suggest you should continue along the less is more route.
Easy navigation and clean product lists
To translate this to your ecommerce site, the research isn't saying you shouldn't stock lots of different products of the same type; it merely means you shouldn't display them all and overwhelm your visitors.
This means you need to think about how your customers find available products. To illustrate this point let's look at Tooled-Up who sell tools. Currently in one category there are 129 Philips screwdrivers, which are displayed in batches of 20. Visitors use the pagination system at the bottom of the page to get to the next 20. This is a classic case of an overwhelming product display.
This could be easily fixed by allowing their customers to filter the list based on size, handle type, brand, availability and price. Sorting by price or popularity is not enough. Unfortunately even filtered results can be overwhelming if you give too many choices; there is a fine balance and the only way to find out what works for your customers is by testing.
To wrap this up
I think it is important not to overwhelm your visitors. You can stock as many products as you like, as long as they can be easily found and it doesn't look like there is too much choice. Test, test and test...run tests to see what works for your site; you may find that even different products require different types of navigation or choice selection.