And then there’s this other part too that’s like “well I CAN make this blue or yellow or red, I know how to make it and I have the supplies for it so why not”. The overall idea is that the more options you give them, the more likely your customers are to find exactly what they need and so you are more likely to make more sales. 

Sadly, that’s not how the human brain works, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Without getting into the details of it, Barry Schwartz in his book “The paradox of choice. WHY MORE IS LESS” (there’s a great Ted Talk on this too if you don’t want to read the book but do want to learn more, it’s quite entertaining actually) has done a lot of research on consumer behavior, psychology studies, happiness surveys around the decisions we have to make and the choices we’re offered when shopping and turns out LESS is MORE. 

The more decisions someone has to make to finalize a purchase, the more stressed and unhappy they feel and the more likely they are to freeze and get into Analysis Paralysis and make no decision at all, meaning you’re not getting a sale at all. 

You really want to reduce the number of options you’re giving people when ordering your products. It might feel counterintuitive but I promise you this is how you’ll finally start making sales or more sales from those listings.

Let’s take a pillow listing as an example to illustrate my point but of course, this applies to you even if you don’t sell pillows as long as you offer variations and personalization options for your products.

So we have a pillow listing. The things you might want to offer are:

• Different sizes (length, width), shape (square, rectangular, circular…), etc.
• Colors: red, blue, orange, burnt orange, purple, black, ivory, etc.
• Pillow + insert or pillow cover only;
• If your design allows for it maybe a secondary color or a color for a thread if there’s anything embroidered on it;
• Oh, and what font do they want for the text on it?
• Finally, what should the text even say? What is the personalized message they want to be written on it?

See how this is starting to be too much? Of course, I exaggerated here and it’s rare to see thatttt many options offered but you’d be surprised, often it’s not far at all with listings commonly offering 4 options: color, size, insert or not + custom message.

And then comes the second layer of indecision: within each option, there are too many sub-options. 15 colors to chose from, 12 font options… That’s way too many decisions your customer has to make. What you’re really doing here is asking them to design their own custom pillow. That’s cool, but that’s not a listing, that’s a custom order. 

You can mention in your listing that if they want more options they can contact you for a custom order. But you don’t want to make them design a pillow if they don’t necessarily want a custom order because what you’re asking them to be then is a designer. And they don’t want that, that’s what they’re paying YOU for.

They’re paying you to pick the best fonts, they’re paying you to pick the best colors that are on trend at the moment, it’s your job to make those decisions and to offer a very curated list of options.

So what’s the solution here?