It’s Saturday evening and you’re planning to have a romantic date with your Netflix account. Just the two of you, no one else interrupting, enjoying a movie to the fullest. You start browsing through what Netflix has to offer and there the first option of choice arises: are you in the mood for a happy-ending love story or Brad Pitt’s Moneyball? Or maybe a movie is not at all what you’re looking for, so you start looking at the endless list of series and documentaries. At some point, you get a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of choice and after 30 minutes you’re still at the point of wandering around in the Netflix catalogue. This is a perfect example of what Barry Schwartz calls the Paradox of Choice, the idea that more choice will lead to more psychological stress and less happy feelings¹.

Too much choice?

The paradox of choice explains that consumers nowadays experience a lot of stress because of all the choices they can make. One example of why this stress is caused is that people often – after they made a choice – begin to reconsider the trade-off of that decision in terms of missed opportunities. “Is the movie that I’m watching now giving me the satisfaction that I’m looking for? With one click, I can still switch to that other one.” This reconsideration in return will affect the amount of satisfaction we experience from the decision. From a neuromarketing perspective, the brain will not focus on what it has, but on what it does not have.

A sweet spot

Does the whole idea of a paradox mean that the best thing to do is give no choice at all? No. Schwartz discovered a so-called sweet spot in the paradox of choice: the point where the number of choices is most effective on our subjective well being². To give you an idea, here’s a visual display of the paradox of choice and the sweet spot.

Applying this knowledge to consumer choice, research indeed shows that a larger assortment of products like jam, chocolate or even pension plans results in less motivation to actually buy the product³. The trick is now to find that sweet-spot: where you offer not too little, but also not too much.

What about eCommerce?

It’s interesting to know whether this paradox also applies to online marketing, webshops and websites. You would expect that online shopping would be able to ‘handle more options’ because of the filters you can apply. If you’re looking for a particular product – e.g. a blue pair of leather shoes – you can use these filters to narrow down the enormous amount of choices that a webshop like eBay has to offer.

According to tech startup Bestmatch, this is indeed the case⁴. They argue that as an online retailer, reducing the number of choices you offer will have three positive outcomes for the customer:

1. improving the quality of decision making
2. making the process of buying a product less stressful
3. more satisfaction with the decision after the purchase

Why your sales will increase by offering fewer products

This shows that for an online platform like a webshop, you will need to create an environment that offers enough, but not too many options. The key here is to create filters that are easy to use. The whole idea of not too much choice is also applicable to websites and online marketing: these need to be kept simple, logic but still informative. A website with an overload of menus and buttons will lead to more psychological distress and confusion. Also, too many pictures or colours will distract the brain from what really matters. Less is more is the key to success.