Last year I found myself entering my idea of hell: a PC World store.

Now I’m sure they’re a very good retailer, and that they sell excellent products at competitive prices. But the problem is that they don’t sell a single thing I want to buy, or even look at. The cacophony of noise and myriad of flashing screens makes me just want to run for the exits. And that’s what I would have done if I hadn’t been there to help someone choose a laptop.

And what a job that is!

Row upon row of identical looking boxes – all with a bewildering list of features and prices, which I’m sure make sense if you know what you’re talking about. But I don’t. If it was up to me, I’d have given up and gone home in an instant…

And if a piece of research I just read is anything to go by, I’m far from alone.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the more choice you give people, the better. If they have more to choose from, then they’ll be more likely to buy. PC World certainly seems to subscribe to that view. But conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and this is probably one of those times.

In an experiment in California, a team of scientists set up a display of jams in a supermarket. Sometimes there were just six jams and other times there were as many as 24. If a shopper tasted one of the jams, they received a discount voucher to buy any jam in the store. The results were surprising to the researchers. The greater the choice of jams, the less they sold. People became confused when faced with a wider choice, and fell back on their default position of buying no jam at all.

And jam is a non-technical, easy to understand, product. Choice still led to confusion, fear and ultimately, inertia.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I know that making a purchase is a stressful activity for many people. They worry about making the right decision, and the more choices there are, the greater the likelihood that the decision they make will be wrong. The safe option is to do nothing.

One of the biggest mistakes I see made in the direct response business is to send out a catalogue to potential customers. The thinking is that the more products you tell people about, the more they’ll collectively buy. But as we’ve seen, it doesn’t always work like that. People simply become confused and fearful, and retreat to the safe harbour position of doing nothing.

Most of us are lazy and risk-averse. By choosing a single product that you think is right for your customer, and then making the strongest possible case for that product, you’ll sell far more than by the scattergun catalogue approach.

But another piece of research I saw recently, suggests there may be an even better way…

A kitchen equipment store started selling a bread-making machine. Sales were poor, until the store added another, more expensive, machine to sit alongside it. Consumers now had something to compare with, and were no longer expected to make a decision in a vacuum. As a result, sales of the original machine improved dramatically.

This may be the best of all worlds ~ just enough choice to give a point of comparison, but not so much that the buyer becomes fearful or confused.

What’s more, it may be that there is an optimal number of items to choose from, before adding another leads to a fall in sales. To suggest that this ‘optimum’ amount of choice holds true for all products ~ that it’s the same for cars as it is for cornflakes ~ would be a little too simplistic. So you may need to do a little experimentation of your own.

But as a broad principle, you’re probably giving your customers too much choice, rather than too little. Do some of the work for them, cut down their options, and they’ll thank you with their hard-earned cash.

 Kind Regards 

John Harrison  

PUBLISHERS NOTICE  

Dear Streetwise Customer, 

  I hope you’re keeping safe and well. 

This offer is limited, so we are only make it available to our most valued Streetwise customers at the moment. 

  Back in the autumn, we alerted a few of our customers to a course, created by a guy making what seemed at the time to be an outrageous prediction.

  He predicted the world would soon be gripped by a unprecedented crisis which would create a huge financial opportunity. Crazy eh? 

  Anyway the course revolved around a strategy which would enable anyone to make £2,803 a month to ‘tick over’ in normal times, but would then transform into a massive fortune maker once the implications of the predicted crisis hit. 

  Not many people (including me!) believed the prediction, but £2,800 a month is certainly worth having and a number of our customers got on the bandwagon and started doing well with it…and then the crisis came…sooner than anyone thought. 

   The big opportunity he planned for is about to hit, and I want as many of our customers as possible to benefit…but there’s a hitch. 

   For reasons explained when you take a look at the details here, I can only help NINE people at the moment. But those nine people are going to get something nobody else has been able to get up until today…

         The full programme in one package and at a huge discount! 

   For full details take a look here. 

 www.streetwisenews.com/secret

Very Best Wishes, 

John Harrison