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HP Finds Showing Fewer Related Items Boosts Sales

Written by Evan Schuman
November 25th, 2008
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When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.

An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this?

Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, Software
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One Comment | Read HP Finds Showing Fewer Related Items Boosts Sales

  1. Brian Says:
    December 8th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

    Yeah I hate how amazon has 50 (these customers bought this) when you go to purchase

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