Are You Driving Away Your Website Traffic By Giving Too Many Choices?

An earlier blog post discussed how you can improve the web page bounce rates. One of the methods suggested in that post was to give the visitor a few more choices. It also warned about too many choices being bad.

The problem of too many choices is discussed very well in a video presentation by psychologist Barry Schwartz. He calls it the paradox of choice and it has some valuable lessons for marketers.

Does your website feature similarly priced products with overlapping features? The customer now has to make a choice. And the most probable choice she or he will make is to look elsewhere or to postpone the decision making! Either way you just lost a potential customer.

An important difference between offline purchases and online purchases is that an online visitor can and will click away in an instant! For an offline purchase the customer has already invested some time and effort to walk into a shop. So, she is not likely to just walk away without making some effort to complete the purchase.

On your website, always clearly define the product variations and explain the differences. Avoid unnecessarily overlapping product features. Make sure that the customer has enough information to make an informed choice without getting confused.

If you have to have different products with overlapping features make them in different price ranges so that the the costlier products have more features. That way the customer will have at least one fixed reference point (the price) from which to make a choice.

Another solution is to ask some questions to your website visitor and then offer the ideal choice based on the answers. If you already have a good reputation your customer will consider you to be an authority on the subject and will gladly accept the recommendation.

So what kind of choices are the bad ones?

• The bad choices confuse the visitor.
• The bad choices force the visitor to postpone the decision.
• The bad choices make the visitor think that you are trying to make him or her buy everything!
• The bad choices make the visitor feel bad about himself and his level of knowledge.

Avoid these and you will have a lot less problems with your websites.