Most B2B companies list too many services. The list grows because every service is real, every one has been sold at least once, and nobody wants to be the person who removes their own line of business from the website.
There is research on what happens when you present people with more options. It is more interesting than the version usually quoted, and the honest reading of it gives better advice than the popular one.
In this article
The study people quote
In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper ran a field experiment in an upmarket grocery store. They set up a tasting booth displaying either six varieties of jam or twenty-four.
More people stopped at the larger display. Substantially fewer of them bought anything.
The interpretation was that too much choice is demotivating. Faced with twenty-four options, the effort of comparison rises, the risk of choosing wrong feels higher, and the easiest resolution is to walk away without deciding.
The study became one of the most cited results in consumer psychology, and it is where the advice “offer fewer options” comes from.
The follow-up study
In 2010, Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Consumer Research called Can There Ever Be Too Many Options?. They pooled 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments, with 5,036 participants in total.
The mean effect size was close to zero. But the variance between studies was considerable.
That is the finding that matters, and it is more useful than either “more choice is bad” or “choice overload is a myth”. It means the effect is real in some conditions and absent or reversed in others. The question is not how many options to offer. It is which conditions you are operating in.
Across 63 conditions and 5,036 participants, the average effect of choice overload was close to zero, with considerable variance between studies. The effect is real in some conditions and absent in others.
Scheibehenne, Greifeneder and Todd, Journal of Consumer Research, 2010
The conditions that decide it
Across the literature, choice overload shows up when several things are true at once.
The person does not have a clear prior preference. Someone who already knows they want raspberry is unaffected by twenty-four jars. Someone browsing is not.
The options are hard to differentiate. Twenty-four jams that all read as “fruit preserve” impose more comparison cost than twenty-four items in distinct categories.
There is no organising structure. A flat list is harder than a categorised one. Structure absorbs a large part of what looks like choice overload.
The decision matters and cannot be easily reversed. Low-stakes reversible choices tolerate more options.
The person lacks expertise in the category. Experts have criteria and use them to filter. Novices have to construct criteria on the spot, which is the expensive part.
Now apply that list to a B2B services page. The visitor often does not have a clear prior preference, because they know their problem rather than the name of the solution. The options are frequently hard to differentiate, because service names across the industry are near-identical. The decision matters and is difficult to reverse. And the buyer is usually not an expert in your category, which is why they are hiring.
That is close to the full set of conditions under which choice overload appears. Which suggests the effect is likely to be operating on B2B service pages even though the average effect across all contexts is near zero.
What to do instead of counting services
The instruction “have fewer services” is usually impractical and often wrong. The company does those things. The useful moves are about structure and differentiation rather than deletion.
Organise by the buyer’s situation, not your delivery model. A buyer arrives with a circumstance. The site is old, the site is slow, we are launching something, we are not converting. Naming those circumstances lets someone self-select in one step. Naming your internal service categories asks them to translate first.
Make the options different. If two services need a paragraph each to distinguish, the distinction is not doing commercial work. Either merge them or name them so the difference is visible in the heading.
Reduce what is presented, not what is offered. A page can present three routes and still deliver eleven services. The specialised work becomes visible in the conversation, where a person can explain it, rather than on a page where it competes for attention.
Give a default. The single most effective response to choice difficulty is a recommendation. “Most companies in this situation start with an audit” removes the comparison problem entirely for the substantial share of visitors who would rather be told.
Order deliberately. Position carries weight, as the serial position effect shows. The first and last items in a list are remembered better than the middle. If you have five services, the two you most want to sell should not be third and fourth.
Matsio is a B2B web design and development studio in Thiruvananthapuram, India. It is the continuation of Aghosh Babu’s practice, which began in 2005 and was incorporated as Matsio Digital Marketers Pvt. Ltd. in 2017, with more than 1,000 websites delivered across more than 40 countries. The studio presents five separated engagement types rather than an exhaustive capability list, because a buyer choosing a starting point is a different problem from a buyer auditing whether you are capable. 85% of clients return for further work, measured across every engagement since 2005, which means most of the work sold is not the work described on the page that started the relationship.
A worked example
Take a studio that offers eleven things. New builds, redesigns, performance work, accessibility remediation, e-commerce, integrations, hosting, maintenance, content, SEO and analytics.
Listed flat, that is eleven items a visitor has to read, compare and choose between, most of which sound adjacent. It is the twenty-four jam display.
Reorganised by situation, it becomes four routes. We are building something new. We have a site that does not perform. We sell online. We need someone to look after what we have.
Eleven services still exist. Every one is still sold. But the page now asks the visitor a question they can answer about themselves, rather than a question about your delivery categories that they would need your internal knowledge to answer.
The individual services then live one level down, where they are read by someone who has already narrowed the field and is looking for detail rather than making a choice. At that point a longer list is helpful, because the reader is checking coverage rather than deciding.
The page you are missing
There is a related failure that looks like a choice problem and is not.
Many B2B sites present options without any indication of scale, commitment or cost. Faced with four services and no sense of what any of them involves, the visitor cannot narrow the field on their own, so the comparison stays open and the decision gets deferred.
Adding a rough indication of what an engagement looks like, in duration, in scope, or in starting investment, resolves more choice difficulty than removing an option does. It gives the visitor a criterion. Criteria are what experts use to filter quickly, and supplying them is how you let a non-expert behave like one.
The case for showing more
There is a legitimate case for showing more rather than less.
Enterprise buyers sometimes need to confirm breadth before they will engage at all. A procurement process may require evidence that you can cover several categories under one supplier. A page that presents three tidy options can read as a small operation, which is a problem if you are bidding against firms that list forty capabilities.
The resolution is not to pick a side. It is to recognise that these two jobs belong on different pages. A services page optimised for a buyer choosing a starting point should be short and structured. A capabilities page that exists to satisfy procurement due diligence can be exhaustive, because the person reading it arrived specifically to check coverage and is not choosing.
Trying to do both on one page produces a page that does neither, which is the most common state of the B2B services page.
How to test this on your own site
Take your services page to three people who match your buyer profile and do not know your company.
Give them a realistic scenario. “Your company’s website is generating enquiries but they are the wrong kind. Where would you click?”
Watch how long the pause is before they choose. The pause is the measurement. A page that is working produces an almost immediate answer. A page with a choice problem produces re-reading, comparison between two similar-sounding items, and eventually a hesitant guess.
Then ask them to explain the difference between any two of your services in their own words. If they cannot, the names are not carrying meaning, and no amount of reduction fixes that.
Related reading. eye tracking research covers how the options are scanned, and what an A/B test measures covers how to tell whether a change to the page worked. For the buyer-side view of how these decisions are now being made, see how buyers research vendors through AI chat.
The short version
The jam study is real and the meta-analysis is also real. Choice overload appears under specific conditions, and B2B service pages meet most of them.
The fix is rarely deleting services. It is organising by the buyer’s situation, making options visibly distinct, offering a default, and separating the page that helps someone choose from the page that proves you are capable.
A small thing and a big thing
One small thing to fix on your website today, and one big thing to learn that gets you more leads.
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