I’m often asked, “How many choices should I provide my customers in each category?” Or I’ve been told, “I don’t have enough designs to have a website?”
So the two questions are:
“How many designs are enough and how many are too many?”
If you look at all the big boys who have gift basket websites, you will see that most of them have a lot of different designs. The reason for that is that Google awards websites that have lots of content and each design page is another page of content.
But if you look at them a bit more carefully, you’ll also see that they break down all those many designs in a number of different categories. Some break it down even more than others. One site might have “birthday gift baskets” while another may break it down into “birthday gift baskets for men,” birthday gift baskets for women,” and “birthday gift baskets for kids.” The purpose is to help make a customer’s choice and buying easier.
Have you ever stopped in front of the cereal aisle in the grocery store not knowing which cereal you want to buy. It can be overwhelming as you have to scan through all the many different brands and kinds to choose from. It can just make you want to give up and not buy any cereal at all.
Well, you are not alone.
A study was done about this and the results are shown in this graphic.
So, how does this apply to your website design?
Instead of providing many, many choices to your visitors and overwhelming them….
You need to cut down the options that you provide to the absolute, bare minimum.
A consumer is bombarded with a lot of information, every day. So, when they visit your website, value their time and present your gift baskets in a way that they can easily navigate and determine quickly what they want to buy.
I’m currently in the process of creating my Christmas Holiday design page on my own website. As I add more and more designs to it, I can see that it is getting overwhelming already.
So what will I do?
Simple. I’ll break them down into more specific categories. Some of the designs may go into several different categories but if someone is looking for a Christmas gift basket for a child, they won’t be interested in those that I created for an office.
Look at your website and see if you have enough designs. But even more important, if you have too many on a page and can break them down into more specific categories. You don’t want your customers to be so overwhelmed that they’ll just leave without buying.