Merchant sites, stands and the like often offer a large number of product choices to their customers. E-COMMERCE: These customers are thus spoiled for choice, hesitating on the many items of the same capacity, which slows down their purchasing decision. This is why the multiplicity of choices offered to the customer, far from being an asset, can serve you, we are talking about it.
The high number of choices can hamper the customer and ultimately prevent them from buying.
Indeed, some sales sites often offer several choices to their customers in order to increase their sales and above all their turnover.
But this sales technique can be less effective and less productive when customers are faced with a choice problem. Ultimately, they may decide not to buy anything because they are spoiled for choice. Some even go back to the internet to get information on all the products available to them. And for good reason, the multiple choice they are faced with.
To remedy this, often offer your customer a limited number of choices or often offer them the best-selling product or the one with positive reviews or feedback. Also, remember to write down all the useful information about the product in question. But above all, make this information easy to understand.
All this will influence the choice of the customer and therefore may push him to complete his purchase.
In short, offering too many choices to the customer:
- Can make him indecisive about his purchases.
- Can negatively affect the items you sell and cause you to lose viewership.
- Can decrease your turnover
Drafter’s Corner wishes you a Happy Ramadan and Ascension Day.
The idea has been around since ancient times. In one of Aesop’s fables, The Fox and the Cat, the fox brags that he has “hundreds of ways of escaping” while the cat has “only one”. But when they hear the hounds coming for them, the cat climbs up a tree while “the fox in his confusion was caught up by the hounds.”
The moral? Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon.
Recently, psychologists have investigated the phenomenon as it relates to consumer behaviour.
In a famous study published in the year 2000, researchers at Columbia University and Stanford University found that actually, increasing your product range may be counterproductive to increasing sales revenue.
You can read the study yourself here if you’d like. I’ll also include all sources at the bottom of this post in case you want to review them later. In any case, here are the cliff notes:
People are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices. Moreover, participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited.
And in 2015, a large meta-analysis that looked at the findings of 99 other studies, researchers at Northwestern University concluded the same thing. When you account for other variables that might reduce or increase decision fatigue, the overall effect of your product range—in and of itself—on overchoice is significant.
So…
More products = more decision fatigue = fewer sales.
But even more than that, even when people do make a decision in spite of experiencing choice overload, they are actually more likely to second-guess their decision and are more likely to feel unsatisfied with the product they bought. With so many choices on the table, how can you be sure you actually picked the best one?
In retail, less is more. My whacky opinion Now, I would take this idea of “less is more” one step further. I haven’t discovered any psychology research that backs this up, but I strongly suspect it to be true:
By increasing the quantity of products that you sell, you decrease the perceived quality and value of each individual product.
There is a reason why we associate the word “boutique” with luxury, and it’s not just because the word is French. No, small scale implies high touch and high quality.
Compare the quantity that H&M offers consumers to the quantity that a retailer like Brooks Brothers or Burberry offers. Compare Walmart to Whole Foods.
All major low-priced brands focus on range. Their retail spaces consist of tens of thousands of square footage filled with clothing racks and product displays. For women, they don’t have just 5 or 10 different blouses. They have 50. For men, they don’t have just 5 or 10 different t-shirts. They have 50 (or at least 20).
These retailers are banking on becoming a one-stop shop for low-priced products in their category. They are betting that people who come into their retail space will leave not just with one or two products, but half a dozen.
And they can afford to make those bets. When you are a multi-billion-dollar brand, you can achieve the economies of scale required to profitably sell products at a fraction of the price of smaller competitors.
The problem is, this business model isn’t for everyone. As Simon Sinek points out in Start With Why, selling based on price is expensive:
Price always costs something. The question is, how much are you willing to pay for the money you make?
There are a lot of successful retailers who have chosen to go a different route. You can find them both among the independent, locally-owned operations as well as the billion-dollar brands of the world.
Rather than appealing to people’s wallets, these companies appeal to people’s hearts.
They have climbed the ladder of Maslow’s needs, from the basics to self-esteem and aesthetic needs. What they offer are not clothes, or furniture, or books: They help customers construct their own personal identities. Because of this, the value of their goods and services is much greater.
What the scientific literature has to say
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the retail spaces of these companies look much different from their mass-market, low-price counterparts.
The H&Ms of the world do what they can to maximize exposure to the aggregate of their product range. High-end stores focus on creating an atmosphere—and maximizing exposure to individual products in their range.
If you go to H&M looking for a sweater, you have at least a dozen to choose from, and probably even more than that. If you go to a Ralph Lauren store, you might have four or five (if even that). In the H&M, you’ll find them hanging on a clothing rack next to dress shirts. You have to pull them out to see what they look like. In the Ralph Lauren store, they lay neatly folded on a solid wood table or in a solid wood bookcase.
Which sweater would you assume is more valuable: the one squeezed into a clothing rack hit by harsh lighting, and red signs that scream “SALE” in the background? Or the one neatly folded and put on display on a backdrop of rich mahogany, next to a slightly aged chesterfield sofa?
When you buy an expensive brand, you buy into a set of values. You choose to attach your identity to a certain type of lifestyle. It’s a way to construct your identity, but also to signal that identity to the rest of the world. Choosing to wear Ralph Lauren polos as opposed to Uniqlo polos says something about who you are. The way Ralph Lauren stores are designed help reinforce the brand’s image as tasteful, premium, and timeless.
Here’s something I just thought of:
The more expensive the consumer brand, the closer the buying experience comes to that of a modern art gallery.
