How to Easily Increase Sales? Don’t trigger decision paralysis in your customers.

The inability to choose from several options due to excessive analytical thinking or too many available choices. The more versions (of a product or service) you offer a customer, the more negative emotions you create in them. A person “freezes in paralysis” and ultimately makes no purchase at all. Situations where customers must choose between two or more options reduce conversions. So how should you work with decision paralysis properly and is it even possible?

Decision paralysis has been one of the biggest marketing challenges ever since the internet began to exist. Behavioral scientist and professor at Duke University, Dan Ariely, aptly noted in one of his interviews that: “People often don’t know what they want.”

The situation is further complicated by the fact that people are naturally risk-averse when it comes to purchasing decisions, and almost every buying decision is emotional to some extent. Customers ask themselves what they should choose. This psychological phenomenon, known in English as decision paralysis, is often the gateway to procrastination.

How Much Information Is Too Little and How Much Is Too Much?

Customers Don’t Like Either.

As a seller, you have the ability to influence the amount of information you present to customers. And there can either be just enough, far too much, or far too little. The last two often lead to decision paralysis.

Vendula Kreplová stated on the website vysokeskoly.cz that: “When we feel overwhelmed by too much information, we fail to pay attention to the truly important details that would make decision-making easier.” As a result, we try so hard to find the perfect solution that we end up analyzing every possible option.

Strategist Jan Štráfelda noted in his article that: “The less information we have about where each choice leads, the more likely we are to choose none of the available options and instead postpone or avoid the decision altogether.” This leads to one conclusion – customers do not like having either too much or too little information. From a conversion perspective, however, information overload is far more dangerous, as demonstrated by the following example.

The Famous “Jam Study” from California showed a Drop in Sales When Too Many Jam Options Were Offered

Marketing expert Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia University and author of the book The Art of Choosing, conducted the famous “jam study” in 1995. At a fruit market in California, she set up a booth with Wilkin & Sons jam samples. “Every few hours, the selection changed – sometimes I offered 24 types of jam, later only 6. Customers sampled an average of two jams regardless of the assortment size,” Iyengar described in an article for The New York Times.

The results were shocking. An incredible 60% of customers were attracted by the larger assortment, while only 40% stopped at the smaller display. However, from the large selection of 24 jams, only 4 % of customers made a purchase, whereas 31 % purchased from the smaller assortment. “Our study revealed an interesting psychological phenomenon – theoretically, we like having choices, but in practice, we prefer choosing from a limited number of products,” Professor Iyengar added. And this is something entrepreneurs can use to their advantage. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how.

Specific numbers from experience:

Out of 100 people who pass by a stand with a larger variety of jams, 60 people stop but only 2.4 make a purchase.

Out of 100 people who pass by a stand with fewer jam options, 40 people stop but 12.4 make a purchase.

 

My takeaway from this is clear:

Use fewer options and focus on capturing attention.

Show a Clear Difference Between the Options!

When faced with 24 types of jam, the issue is not only the quantity. It is also about evaluating the differences between the options. “The more options there are, the more similar they seem and the harder it becomes to decide,” explains strategist Jan Štráfelda. Even choosing between just two versions can be difficult if they are too similar and the difference between them is so subtle that customers barely notice it. Let’s look at two examples.

• For many years, the Wikipedia website displayed a search bar with two buttons. One said “Go” and the other “Search.” Even though users only had two options, they still experienced paralysis because the difference between them was unclear.

• When pre-ordering a product in the Amazon mobile app, you may again see two buttons. One says “Pre-order Now” and the other “Pre-order Today.” The first takes users directly to checkout, while the second adds the item to the cart. However, the difference is not obvious, which leads to decision paralysis.

Tip: Help customers make decisions through a so-called “pre-selection.”
If you offer 3 similar product options in your online store, label one of them as “Recommended.” This removes part of the decision-making burden from the customer. The downside is that you may not perfectly serve customers with very specific requirements but the significantly higher conversion rates are usually worth it.

Guide the Customer Step by Step Like a Fifth Grader

If you divide the decision into multiple steps, you make the purchase easier for customers and increase the likelihood that they will successfully complete it instead of abandoning their cart halfway through.

Guiding customers “by the hand” supports quick decision-making, which is exactly what you want. “Do you know that feeling when we think about a decision for too long? We reach a point where we no longer see the differences clearly, and even after deciding, we’re not satisfied with the outcome. The longer the decision-making process takes, the more uncertain the result becomes,” states Shopify.com.

One of the best ways to eliminate decision paralysis is to simplify the decision-making process as much as possible. In e-commerce, for example, this can be achieved through product filtering. It is much easier to choose from 8 products (with 3 variants each) than from 100 randomly displayed products in an online store. In the first case, you minimize the risk of making the wrong choice, which increases customer trust.

Tip: Help customers by dividing the buying process into smaller, more manageable parts. A series of smaller decisions is easier for them to process. John Lewis does this brilliantly. When buying a television on their website, customers first compare all available options, and then the site clearly explains each next step they need to take. They guide you through the entire process, leaving no chance for you to get lost along the way.

Don’t Force Customers to Choose. Present Them with a Ready-Made Solution

This concept is professionally known as “setting a default option.” It means that, as the seller, you preconfigure the purchase settings so they either: cannot be changed (customers assume they are fixed and stop thinking about them), or are reduced to the smallest possible number of options.

A typical example of the second approach is donations to nonprofit organizations.

• If donors are allowed to choose any donation amount, they immediately start considering an enormous range of possibilities – from 1 CZK to 1,000,000 CZK. Decision paralysis takes over, and they are more likely to leave the website.

• But if you preset, for example, 4 default options: “50 CZK,” “100 CZK,” “200 CZK,” and “Other” (with an added label like “Most Popular” next to one option), you reduce decision paralysis and make the process much easier for donors.

Let’s look at one more example – this time from the field of healthcare. We certainly do not want to return to times when doctors made the hardest decisions for us, such as whether to disconnect a loved one from life support. On the other hand, having to make such a decision entirely on your own can also be unbearable. Professor Iyengar explored this issue by comparing how American and French families coped with the heartbreaking decision of whether to disconnect a terminally ill child from life support.

“In the United States, parents must decide whether to end treatment, whereas in France, doctors make the decision unless the parents explicitly object,” Iyengar explains. She concluded that French families were generally less emotionally devastated by what happened because the crucial decision had been made by the doctors. By contrast, American parents emotionally collapsed in nearly 100% of cases after making the decision themselves. That is why you should always consider whether the other person truly benefits from having the choice at all.