The mind is your customers’ main ally when it comes to buying. Let’s analyze how information overload impacts each of them.
Does having too many options benefit or ruin your eCommerce?
One of the biggest causes of cart abandonment has to do purely and exclusively with the cognitive overload of having too many options in front of the user’s eyes.
This definition is totally related to the learning process that our brain performs for each input received. When this capacity is exceeded, that is when the problems begin. The cognitive load is too great and silent enemies appear making us feel overwhelmed, confused and fatigued. This can lead to paralysis by analysis, where consumers end up choosing nothing. Kind of like when you try to choose a movie on a streaming platform with thousands of options: you end up spending so much time deciding that in the end you don’t watch anything.
This clearly has an impact on sales conversions, hurting the user experience and increasing cart abandonment.
There are many specialists on the subject who explain this, such as the American psychologist Barry Schwartz, who deals with morality, decision making and the interrelations between science and society. In his book “The Paradox of Choice”, he explains how having too many choices can overwhelm consumers and lead to decision paralysis: “Choice overload often leads to inaction, as people cannot make a decision in the face of the overwhelming number of alternatives”. He also puts a lot of emphasis on the famous slogan “Less is more”.
Some of the direct consequences we see in the face of the aforementioned problems are:
- Decrease in user satisfaction.
- Increased cart abandonment rate.
- Purchase decisions postponed or avoided.
- Lower conversion rate.
Is it possible to mitigate this famous cognitive overload?
There are some strategies to reduce this cognitive overload:
- Design simplification
- Efficient options management
- Urgency and scarcity
Design simplification: achieving intuitive navigation can be one of the main ways to decrease cognitive overload. Implementing well-organized menus allows users to easily find product categories and subcategories.
Efficient management of options: filtering and sorting is one of the most positive ways to deal with the problems we face. The
advanced filters allow users to quickly narrow down the number of options according to their preferences, such as price, brand, size, color and any other metadata. In addition, custom sorting helps users sort products by relevant criteria such as popularity, price (ascending or descending) and novelty.
Personalized recommendations use recommendation algorithms to display relevant products based on each user’s browsing and shopping behavior.
The “recommended products” section includes a suggestion of recommended products in the search section.
Urgency and scarcity: providing limited-time offers, implementing countdown timers for limited-time offers encourages quick decisions.
Benefits of giving limited options in eCommerce:
- Reduces cognitive overload: as we already mentioned, it manages to minimize the amount of data and information that the user accesses when interacting in eCommerce. This way we reduce the decisions they have to make, avoid them feeling overwhelmed and lost, and help them focus and decide which of our products they are going to choose.
- Facilitates decision making: some say that the fewer options, the easier and faster it is to choose. If we only have A and B to choose from, we will definitely do it almost immediately, compared to if we have a complete alphabet to choose from.
- Increases consumer satisfaction: it will clearly be a more user-friendly and user-friendly website. Users enjoy a smoother and more pleasant shopping experience, increasing their overall satisfaction.
- Simplify the checkout process: an indispensable requirement for any user to make a purchase and even repeat it. Designing a clear and direct purchase flow and eliminating barriers and frictions in the process reduces cart abandonment and improves conversion rates.
3 Strategies to increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment.
With all that we have discussed above, we can deduce that there are key tools or functionalities that allow to achieve optimal navigation and user experience results.
1) Be sure to offer appropriate recommendations.
Many times customers are not looking for something specific and the web does not guide them to products that match their tastes.
That is why it is essential to offer recommendations based on the visual style and adapted to the tastes and preferences of each one of them. This makes it easier to make purchasing decisions quickly and confidently.
Suggesting related or complementary products increases the average purchase ticket and cross-selling.
2) Improve the user experience to increase conversions.
One of the ways in which users interact with the store is through search filters.
Choosing the right filters is key for your customer’s experience to be satisfactory.
The most commonly used filters are: gender, brand, size, color and price. Although if you want to increase conversions you should not forget to add filters such as: fit, length, material or season.
3) Guide your customer to the products you want to sell the most.
Users don’t spend hours searching for a product, so the ones that are better positioned are the most likely to be sold.
Use this to your advantage to reduce cognitive overload by limiting the number of products displayed and matching them with your sales priorities to reduce mental effort and avoid cart abandonment.
For this purpose the personalized results tool is very useful as it allows you to choose and promote specific products to appear in the first results.
How can I apply these tips?
Getting the same tool to attack this problem by following so many different strategies may seem difficult but there is a concrete solution that makes it easy:
If you want to be able to apply all these tips in the easiest and most effective way Kimera Technologies is the solution.
It is a tool that applies artificial intelligence in search engines and eCommerce recommenders so that your customers always find what they are looking for. It improves search accuracy by 187%, increases conversions by 23% and reduces cart abandonment by 29%.
Contact us and start increasing conversions now!
