No Such Thing as Too Much Chocolate: Evidence Against Choice Overload in E-Commerce.

E-commerce designers must decide how many products to display at one time. Choice overload research has demonstrated the surprising finding that more choice is not necessarily better?selecting from larger choice sets can be more cognitively demanding and can result in lower levels of choice satisfaction. This research tests the choice overload effect in an e-commerce context and explores how the choice overload effect is influenced by an individual's tendency to maximize or satisfice decisions. We conducted an online experiment with 611 participants randomly assigned to select a gourmet chocolate bar from either 12, 24, 40, 50, 60, or 72 different options. Consistent with prior work, we find that maximizers are less satisfied with their product choice than satisficers. However, using Bayesian analysis, we find that it's unlikely that choice set size affects choice satisfaction by much, if at all. We discuss why the decision-making process may be different in e-commerce contexts than the physical settings used in previous choice overload experiments.