Decision Fatigue: Do Your Customers Have Too Many Choices?
Life is all about choices and each day, we’re faced with a lot of them.
Have you ever had a strenuous day full of decision-making and come home only to feel completely exhausted? This phenomenon, known as decision fatigue, is a state of mental overload caused after making many decisions and can harbor an individual’s ability to make sound decisions as the day goes on. In other words – when our brain is stressed out with choice, our capacity to make decisions… gets worse.
In the retail space, we see the effects of decision fatigue impede the consumer’s buying behavior quite often. In stores where customers are flooded with product options, it tends to diminish the evaluation of cost-benefits, trade-offs, and many other things leading up to a purchase. As the level of fatigue grows, customers are more likely to go with the easiest option (regardless of other factors), make more impulsive choices, or even make no choice at all. As you evaluate the shop-ability of product categories in your store – are you aiding customers in the decision-making process or making it harder? Check out these tips for combating decision fatigue in your retail store and knowing when you have too many choices for your customers.
- 1. Be on the lookout for cannibalizing sales.
It’s great to have a large variety of products, until it is not. In the market, product cannibalization occurs when there is a loss of sales volume or revenue of one product due to the introduction of a new product. If you find that products that once performed well are declining because many competitive items have been brought in – you might be at risk of cannibalizing sales. This scenario reduces purchases of the older product and ends up eating away at your overall store profits. Before adding new inventory, be sure to conduct thorough market research to identify if the new product has a distinguishable audience you can target that won’t impact the performance of your existing products. When new items are introduced that share the same customer base as one of your existing high-performance products, it’s bound to split sales.
- 2. More time in store is not necessarily a good thing.
If you find that your customers are lingering around your store for a longer period of time than usual, they may be experiencing decision fatigue. Consumers today want to make smart and informed purchase decisions which can be somewhat difficult when there are a million different options on the table. Customers may feel annoyed or overwhelmed by having to spend extra time weighing out the difference in benefits, price, etc. of many different products and will ultimately blame you for not making the decision process easier.
- 3. Self-evaluate.
Part of helping your customers avoid decision fatigue is improving your own decision-making skills. When you evaluate your own decision-making process, you’re better inclined to be aware of your own judgment and biases that can prevent a decision that’s impulsive or cause you to move forward when your inclination is to procrastinate. Consistently evaluate with your team changes in sales and consumer behavior that acknowledges the potential fatigue people are experiencing in-store. Work with your colleagues to identify ways to simplify your customer’s experience in-store so they leave feeling confident in their purchase after each visit.
