The other night I was on my way to my salsa class (hey I moved to South Florida 3 years ago, and if I don’t learn to speak Spanish or at least dance salsa, what was the point of moving here in the first place?)

In any event, I digress. I had a lot of salsa to dance that night, and I was hungry.

So I pulled randomly into this shopping center because I saw a sandwich shop and as I debated whether or not to try out this establishment, I quickly noticed the “As Seen On Food Network” sign in the window and BAM. I was sold.

INSTANT CRED, my friends. I won’t today insert my rant about why you need testimonials, trust logos, and other accolades on your website, or in this case in the window of your retail store/restaurant. (Cough, Cough – ACCOLADES, get them! Now! Put them on your website, cough cough)

Let’s carry on. So, If Guy Fieri says a sandwich shop is good, ladies and gentlemen, you can bet, it is good.

I found a meatball sandwich on the specials menu at this joint. The ingredients, so fresh. The flavors, unbelievable! It was an explosion of flavor in my mouth. There was indeed a menu full of other options, but I chose to go with this meatball sandwich. Why? Maybe because I like meatballs, or maybe because it was on the specials menu.

Irregardless, needless to say, I returned a few days later, and I once again, ordered my meatball sandwich. I’m a creature of habit. Once I find something I like, I do tend to stay loyal to that.

Folks…

What is your website’s meatball sandwich?

In other words, what are the most commonly ordered products and services?

Studies have been conducted on the “Paradox Of Choice”. That is, you can actually hurt your chances of a sale or lead on your website, by presenting way too many options on a given page.

Sometimes we figure, “well let’s try to address EVERYONE’s needs”. But the problem with this is, the anxiety we create in our website visitors by presenting them with too many options causes a cognitive overload (thus creating a feeling or anxiety or even fear), and thus, many times, they leave, and you don’t get the sale.

Again, going back to the restaurant example. (You’d think I was 400 lbs, but I’m not, thanks to my salsa hobby. I do eat a lot though…)

Now Picture This…

You’re sitting at your favorite restaurant with a group of friends, and you already know what YOU’RE getting.

The rack of ribs, the vegan tofu quinoa salad, whatever it might be… But everyone else? You can bet you won’t be ordering for at least another 15 minutes, and maybe more, depending on how many people are in your party. Better get an appetizer and a beer! Jodi’s going to take at least half an hour more.

WHY?

WHY should it take so long?

I mean, you ARE at one of the BEST restaurants in town. This is because people are AFRAID to make the WRONG choice. Some people just CAN’T decide, and force other people to decide for them.

Some people will split 2 dishes with their significant other (I used to do this as a strategy to be able to eat 2 things and minimize my anxiety of having to choose – I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this…).

This is also why many restaurants will make decisions to simplify their menus, reducing the # of non selling items, in order to increase sales on the more popular or more profitable items. They streamline not only the menu, but their operating costs by not having to hold inventory on lower volume items.

You might think, “hey, we don’t hold inventory, we drop ship!”. Sorry guy, that doesn’t matter. What matters here is are people leaving your website without purchasing at an extraordinary rate? Is your “conversion rate” a measly 1-2% or wore?

The “Paradox Of Choice” is shown in studies like the “Jam Study” that was conducted by psychologists in a Bay area supermarket, where they studied the effects of having 24, or 6 jams on a display rack. The results? The rack with just 6 jams outsold the rack with 24 jams, by over 10X.

Now keep in mind, this doesn’t mean the supermarket got rid of every other product in the store (As I’m going to make an analogy to eCommerce in a moment), but on that specific rack, or ‘category’ (cough, cough – landing page!), if you will, the # of choices available did indeed impact sales.

Think about it. Even companies like Coca Cola, have increased market share by having more products, but not by having more choices within micro segments of each category. In other words, yes, they’ve added products like “Coke Zero”, but they haven’t added dozen of choices within each sub category. They know this would cannibalize their profits on their key products so they don’t even try. They already know what would happen.

So let’s bring this back to the web component for a moment.

On YOUR website, you have to minimize distracting elements and this can be in the product/service descriptions itself, or how many products you are displaying, in the case of an ecommerce store. Specifically, how you are positioning those products within various categories.

So no, if you have 1000 products, don’t just arbitrarily get rid of 900 of them, but first do a deep analysis of what sells and what does not.

Highlight what sells, and consider removing what does not. In other words, if you are selling let’s say, children’s books, and you have 100 books across 5 key categories. If you have 40 books that haven’t sold in a year, you probably should remove them off the website unless you can revisit how they are being positioned. You’ll likely see an increase in sales as a result, just by removing the additional un-necessary choices.

Then, you evaluate within each category how to optimize those categories, category pages, and deep pages for each product. Don’t distract people with things that don’t sell or rarely sell.

And after all, why should you care how your website is structured? Is this too much to think about?

Well, if the idea of getting 50, 100% or even more leads or sales from your website without spending more on advertising doesn’t excite you, then you are probably in the wrong business!

Justin Gross is the founder of Hop2TheTop, a Google Certified PPC Agency based in South Florida that specializes in PPC Campaign Management, Website Analytics, and Landing Page Optimization. He has been a speaker for brands like Comcast and Servpro, and has consulted with brands such as Honda, Toyota, and Ortho-McNeil. As Justin says “I love making websites more profitable!”