💡 6 tips to make your good product finder great

So are you going to launch your first choice aid (or have recently launched one). Super! With a good choice aid, you help customers find the product that suits them best in your webshop. And that then leads to higher conversion rates and one lower customer service burden.

But how do you ensure that your new decision aid actually lives up to these expectations? Check out our 6 tips to help you good decision aid perfect to make!

Tip 1 - remove products

Of course, you are proud of all the products you sell. And for good reason. But that pride can sometimes get in the way of giving you good advice. If you have hundreds or even thousands of products in your selection aid, chances are that your customer will receive advice with a lot of product recommendations that are not sufficiently distinctive. This means that the “best match” for the customer does not differ from option number 2, 3,... or 10.

You may be thinking: “That sounds like a great result! The customer can choose from 30 great options”. However, that line of thought is mainly in line with the traditional e-commerce approach, where more is always better. If you look at this result from the perspective of choice psychology, you'll soon see that it won't work this way. After all, the decision aid does not do what it should do: solving the product overload, stress and uncertainty and thus help the customer choose a product. Presenting 30 good alternatives, or even just 3, that all “perfectly” meet the customer's needs is not an ideal situation for a customer to make a decision.

So what is the best result? A (small) number of recommendations, one of which is the clear winner because of the perfect match with the desired criteria. In addition, 1 or 2 runners-up as good alternatives — and then you can easily show another product that meets some of the desired criteria not complies. By organizing your advice in this way, you reduce choice stress, fear of buying and procrastination.

But which products do you cut from your decision aid? The easiest products to omit are similar products with different SKUs. For example, you can remove different color variants or a different amount of the same product. After all, both can ruin your advice page.

Tip 2 - end with your most 'soft' question

Customers are more likely to come back to some questions - or rather, to their answers - than to others. If you want to buy a child car seat, you're more likely to want to change the answer to the question “Does the seat have to grow with the child?” then the question “How old is the child?” So make sure to place the more “soft” questions at the end of your decision aid.

We see 2 good reasons for this. First, customers don't have to go all the way back to the beginning to play with certain options. In addition, these kinds of questions are often a little more difficult to answer. Research shows that easy questions at the beginning of a questionnaire lead to a higher percentage of completed questionnaires.

Tip 3 - traceability design

Product advice = advice.

And advice isn't a filtered category page with lots of products without an explanation of the filters used. Imagine a sales call in a store where the seller points to thirty products that are right for you but doesn't tell you why that are relevant to you. That doesn't help anyone.

Good product advice consists of a well-compiled set of recommendations, with an explanation that explains why these products suit this specific customer. It should be easy for a customer to see when a product meets or does not meet their needs and expectations. those traceability helps customers deal with the fear of buying that often occurs in today's e-commerce.

Product advice with traceability: the check marks and crosses indicate why the product (does not) suit the customer.

Tip 4 - watch your language

Customers can only make a choice when they have a good understanding of the content. So jargon, cryptic language, complicated words and complex sentences don't belong in your decision aid. And you don't want to burden readers with unnecessarily long words and phrases. Especially not when the content is complex.

It's easy to do things difficult to make. Think of almost all processes, procedures and products. It's hard to do things easy to make. To get a message back to its core, you need to be extremely clear about what you want to communicate. What's it really about without the fuss, the bullshitty and other animal additives? How do you translate complex material into understandable texts without losing content? And how do you make this accessible to all target groups?

Our tips for writing texts for a good decision aid:

• Write at language level B1, or even A2. 95% of the Dutch population can understand the latter. There are various online tools for checking the language level of a text.
• Delete. We are often tempted to use more words than we really need to. Or: we often use more words than necessary. Or: use fewer words. Weigh each word carefully. Does it really add anything?
• Take your time! Writing good texts takes time. Lots of time. If a text takes you little time, chances are that the text is not good (enough). The more you invest in writing, the less the customer has to invest in reading.
• Put your ego aside. A text is at the service of your customer. It's not a showcase of your vocabulary. Nor is it a showcase of your product. You write good texts for the customer.

Tip 5 - be pragmatic

Sure, you can try to make your decision aid look like the perfect in-store sales conversation. However, if you can access 90% of the offline experience with 6 questions, and need an additional 10 questions to get to a perfect advice might not be worth going for 💯.

Longer questionnaires will often (but not always!) result in less well-rounded decision aids. This may damage the usage figures of the decision aid. And a higher drop-off rate means you're helping fewer customers. As your imaginary perfect assistant would help 1% of your customers (because the rest were bored and dropped out), and your just a little less perfect assistant helps 5% of your customers, so which one is the better assistant?

Are you unsure? Simply build both decision aids and A/B test them to find out which version provides the best results.

Tip 6 - put it live

Resign yourself to the fact that the first version of your decision aid will never be the best. But also in the fact that the first version will immediately help customers better. In fact, this bar is now rather low. You're taking the step from “not helping people choose at all” to “already helping some people choose”. And that is possible for one product or product category. Or a specific target group. Or a subset of products. With your first version, you're going to make things better than they are now.

So break that barrier as quickly as possible and bring your first decision aid live. This is how you ensure that:

• you know what it takes to “complete the circle” (from conceiving to building and putting it live);
• you help people directly;
• you achieve results that generate more internal enthusiasm.

And so you can then put more time and energy into optimizing the decision aid.

“Better is good” - Barack Obama

Want to read more about how other web shops use decision aids? Check out:

• The number 1 challenge of web shops (and it's not turnover)
• How Prénatal increased the conversion five-fold with a decision aid
• How to make e-commerce human again