Paradox of Choice

Have you ever hear of the “Paradox of Choice?” It’s an interesting concept that was popularized by American psychologist Barry Schwartz when he published his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, in 2004. Schwartz studied economics and psychology and became intrigued by westerns happiness levels based on the amount of presented choices.

Essentially, when you have an overabundance of options it actually leads to LESS sales. It’s crazy to think this is the case considering you’d think having more options would mean you would be appealing to more people. But it actually has the opposite effect. Here’s what happens… as humans, we’re sick of making decisions. Down right tired of it.

So when a potential client gets overwhelmed by too many options, they’re more likely to simply just walk away without making a purchase at all. It’s almost sends them into a state of paralysis, they get too many choices, then too much thought is required. Not to mention the increased likely hood of buyers remorse. Questions like, “maybe I should have picked the grey hat instead of the black hat?” come into play. When if only one option was available, that wouldn’t have even entered the customers mind.

In the book, they mention an experiment they run at a grocery store. One booth offers 24 different jams when another only offers 6 options. While more people stopped by the booth with more variety… consumers were far less purchases. So the booth with way more limited options ended up doing more sales. So I guess the point of this blog post to to consider this when offering merch. If you’re wanting to explore different color options instead of doing 3 different color tees, only do one color to start. Sell that one tee shirt color as a limited edition run so you can create a call-to-action with your customers, “We have super limited supply of this color, and we will NOT be restocking this color again - so get it while you still can!” This type of call-to-action creates more motiveation since FOMO (the fear of missing out) is invovled. Then once that tee shirt color is sold out, feature another limited edition color. If you’re interested in learning more about this concept of FOMO, limited edition swag, and being more strategic with your merch release, check out our other post here.