This Really Surprised Me
I like to start my day with a short motivation session and one of the sites I regularly visit during this session is the Ted’s Talks site.
One of the talks that I listened to recently included some surprising statistics that could change the way we think about ecommerce.
The theme of the talk was ‘Less is More’, an expression that I’ve heard many times in the past. However, the general view when it comes to marketing online is that more is better.
Every product offered for sale now has to include a full bag of bonuses to be worth considering. We’ve become conditioned to expect bonuses now with affiliates competing with each other to pile on the biggest, most valuable bonus pack.
Which is why I found the findings from Sheena Iyengar so surprising. In her talk she was highlighting something that she calls the choice overload.
Her research suggests that giving customers more choice could actually end up with less sales rather than more.
In one research study that she carried out she chose a grocery store that sold, amongst other things, a very large range of jam.
She wanted to know whether offering such a large number of different jams resulted in more sales of jam. So she set up a booth in the store and one occasion offered shoppers 24 jars of different types of jam and on another occasion she offered them just 6 jars of different types of jam.
The results of this experiment were very interesting. What she found was that more people stopped and checked out the different types of jam when there were 24 types on the table. This is what I would have expected and ties in with the accepted norm online that more is better.
But that wasn’t all she found. It turned out that although less people stopped to browse when there were only 6 jams to choose from, they actually bought more jam than the group that had the bigger choice.
Seems like less really can be more and I think that this concept may have a significant implication when it comes to running an ecommerce site.
With the latest release of Amazing Selling Machines lots more people are beginning to build Amazon businesses using the Amazon FBA system. Keeping the choices that we give our potential customers small could actually result in more sales.
The second experiment that she did involved a magazine isle in a store and was also interesting. She found that we can handle more categories than we can choices.
It turned out that when she displayed 600 magazines split into 10 categories or 400 magazines split into 20 categories people felt they had more choice when presented with the 400 magazines. Having more categories was better received.
This also has implications for our ecommerce stores. If we want to increase our product range we should split them up into more categories.
This proves, if proof were needed, that testing is vital in all areas of our online businesses.
