Paralyzed by choiceHow a plague of endless options has ruined online shopping

Last Christmas, my partner’s parents made an extremely generous offer: We’d been sleeping on a luxuriously cooling, king-size Zinus mattress whenever we visited, and they asked whether we wanted one of our own. The only thing we needed to do was pick a bed frame. Easy, right?

Our first thought was to head to Ikea and purchase our current bed frame in a bigger size, but it was out of stock, so we turned to the internet. Searching “wooden bedframe” on the furniture e-commerce store Wayfair, whose tagline is “every style, every home,” yielded over 13,000 results. Amazon gave us a smaller but not particularly more manageable 6,000, with sponsored or “trending” bed frames that weren’t in our price range — or made of wood at all — frequently front-loaded. The task was daunting.

We spent hours at a time clicking between product pages and toggling between search parameters, but none of the options ever lined up. Eventually, buying a new bed frame began to feel like a part-time job that neither of us had time for. Almost a year later, we’re still crowding into our old, sagging queen with two dogs and a cat.

We aren’t the only people feeling paralyzed by making a purchase: On the Reddit forum r/Mattress, person after person complains of the time they have spent navigating a maze of distinctions, like “cooling” and “ultracooling,” “medium” and “medium firm,” or “memory foam” and “hybrid.” For some, the task of buying a mattress was too much: “The mattress industry destroyed me emotionally and spiritually,” one post read. “This is ruining my life,” someone else wrote.

It’s not just big, life-altering purchases, either: In a recent Accenture survey of 19,000 consumers around the world, 74% of respondents said that they had abandoned an online shopping cart at least once in the past three months because they felt “bombarded by content, overwhelmed by choice and frustrated by the amount of effort they need to put in to making decisions.” This inability to commit to a purchase was reported by people shopping for clothes (79%), flights (72%), and even snacks (70%).

Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College psychology professor, famously called this the “paradox of choice”: While having a wider variety of choices can initially make us happier, the more options we have, the harder it can be to choose the best one for us.

Schwartz’s 2006 book drew inspiration from a study that found that shoppers in a grocery store were 10 times as likely to purchase jam after sampling from a display of six jam varieties than they were from a sampling of 24. Online shopping, which the US Census Bureau estimates accounts for roughly 16% of all retail sales, theoretically makes it easier to find exactly what we are looking for. But it also takes the jam problem and multiplies it by several orders of magnitude: We’re inundated with hundreds and thousands of choices. With so much information about those choices, it sometimes can feel impossible to go on. What’s more, experts say that many of the tools we rely on to help us sift through all of this information — from product descriptions to search engines to e-commerce filters — may actually be making the process even harder.

The golden age of comparison shopping isn’t so golden after all.

The internet changed not just how we shop but also the number of options retailers can offer. Superstores that used to be limited by their square footage could now fill warehouses with thousands of items that would ship straight to customers’ doorsteps. As a result, the retail landscape began to lean toward larger stores with more options.

Jason Goldberg, the chief commerce-strategy officer of Publicis Groupe, said “category killers” like PetSmart and Toys “R” Us outcompeted the neighborhood mom-and-pop pet and toy stores of yesteryear — only to find themselves losing out to stores with even bigger inventories, such as Amazon and Walmart. “In the history of retail, businesses with larger assortments have come in, and they’ve won out over businesses with small assortments,” he said.

Shoppers, it turns out, love the convenience of the one-stop shop. But that has left us with an ever-increasing number of options. “Amazon’s doing what we think the American dream is, which is, have all the choice in the world,” Jessecae Marsh, a professor of psychology at Lehigh University, told me. “But choice can be paralyzing.”

Consumers start to believe they can find ‘the best option’ out there, which can then lead to additional stress and decision paralysis.

Part of the problem, Marsh said, comes down to the way our brain makes choices. When shopping, we typically start by looking for ways to narrow down the set of choices, such as by filtering out things we can’t afford or that aren’t the size we want. Then we look for a reason to pick one of the remaining items over the others. “When we try to make decisions, we want a reason behind the decision,” she said.

This helps explain why ratings and reviews have become such a popular feature on online marketplaces: When we’re comparing two similar items, we need to find a piece of information that breaks the tie. A higher star rating, or a slate of glowing reviews from other customers, can be enough to do the trick. The trouble is that having more information at our disposal isn’t always helpful. And sometimes, it can render decision-making more difficult.

In a series of experiments testing how the presence of diagrams influenced people’s ability to correctly answer questions about topics like managing body weight, Marsh and Samantha Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at the Stevens Institute of Technology, found that while some guiding information could be helpful, too much information made picking the right answer almost as difficult as if the participants had received no guiding information at all. While the study, published last year in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, didn’t focus on shopping, their results suggested that the more information we wade through when we’re trying to make a decision, the more likely we are to come across something that conflicts with our beliefs, which complicates the decision-making process.

“If you’ve tried an Oil of Olay moisturizer, and you had a reaction to it, but you’re seeing website over website telling you that’s the best one, you’re now in a position where the information that you’re getting doesn’t match information that you hold in your own head,” Marsh said. “That conflict is always going to be hard for people because they don’t exactly know how to resolve it.”

It doesn’t help that the tools we use to reduce overwhelm may actually make things even more daunting. Raluca Ursu, an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, told me that tools like filtering, sorting, and using recommendations could bog us down by revealing new factors to investigate, which leads people to search more — and, research has found, be less satisfied with their choices. Search engines such as Google, which present options in a ranked list, can also lead to a “maximizer” mindset. “Consumers start to believe they can find ‘the best option’ out there, which can then lead to additional stress and decision paralysis,” Ursu told me. The decline of Google Search probably doesn’t help matters, either.

Ursu has studied two factors in shopping: search costs and search fatigue. “Search costs generally reflect the time and effort consumers require to obtain information about a product,” she said via email. “How difficult is it to determine this TV’s price and technical specifications?” While search costs are typically much smaller online than they are IRL, where you have to jump in a car and drive to a store, search fatigue grows when shopping online because there’s more information available and more options to sift through. Ursu guessed that the most exhausting stage of shopping is comparison shopping — when people pore over minuscule details between products to find the best one.

If people abandon their shopping carts because they get overwhelmed by search fatigue, it can come back to bite retailers. In a study that looked at browsing data from clothing shoppers in the Netherlands, Ursu and her fellow researchers Qianyun Zhang and Elisabeth Honka found that reducing search fatigue by half led to a slight increase in transactions. They also found that search fatigue tended to affect smaller retailers more than larger ones since people tend to spend all their energy shopping at larger stores first.

In fashion, perhaps no company embodies the paradox of choice more than Stitch Fix, which launched in 2011 with a counterintuitive business model: People who didn’t have the time or patience to shop could undergo a virtual consultation with one of the firm’s in-house stylists, then receive a subscription box filled with a selection of items that had been handpicked for them. It worked: By 2017, the company had gone public at a valuation of $1.4 billion, only to surge to a $11 billion market cap in early 2021, when many customers were holed up at home.

“Having someone do that front-loaded effort, that seems really valuable,” Marsh said. It’s the same thing we would do by bringing a contractor into a house to ask, “What are the options here to expand this bathroom?”

The most important thing is shoppers getting to a place where they’re dealing with fewer options.

After lockdowns ended, the company decided to introduce an option where customers could shop for individual items from categories like “jeans,” “Lauren Ralph Lauren,” and “workwear under $80.” But since that pivot away from its core business, the company has been losing customers every year. Today, Stitch Fix is valued at $400 million, just a fraction of its market cap at its 2017 initial public offering. Goldberg, the chief commerce-strategy officer, said it’s possible that the company’s struggles are due to macro factors, like subscription fatigue and a sales slowdown in the clothes business. “Twenty years ago, you spent 6% of your budget on clothes; today, you spend 3% of your budget on clothes,” he said. “People used to buy Stitch Fix for clothes to wear to work. You know what people don’t do anymore?” Still, the company’s decline raises an important point about the value of curation.

Short of changing their business models, companies can make things easier on shoppers by simplifying their site designs, reducing friction during checkout, and keeping extraneous information to a minimum. Offering shoppers more personalized search results is another big piece of the puzzle, and the experts I spoke to say artificial intelligence may be able to help us winnow our choices down — that’s the guiding idea behind Rufus, a new conversational chatbot from Amazon that answers questions and makes product recommendations. Of course, there’s the danger AI will overwhelm us with spam and slop first.

As Marsh sees it, though, the most important thing is shoppers getting to a place where they’re dealing with fewer options, even if they believe that more is better. “Whatever people think they want, they should have something a little bit less than that,” she said. Marsh recommended researching a category and figuring out what product attributes matter most to you before you start shopping. She also suggested turning the decision over to a consumer guide, a retailer quiz, or someone who has tried a product before you. Many people already do this with beauty influencers: If you have a similar skin or hair type to someone, seeing what works and what doesn’t for them can help narrow down your choices.

Still, deciding what to buy can be excruciating — even for people who study decision-making for a living. Recently, after an “extremely overwhelming” experience selecting a bed frame for her own house on Wayfair, Marsh said she realized she was going to need a new rug. “I started looking through the options, and I was like, ‘I just can’t,'” she told me. “We’re going to have to go to a store. I just can’t do it again.”