The Coffee Flask Conundrum

During Dussehra celebrations in our condominium, the festive fervour was notches higher in a few men and women. They were crushing the Bhangra version of Garba that we do in the north.? Upon closer look, I noticed an occasional sipping out of coffee sippers and flasks. One of them was kind enough to offer me a sip as a token of apology for sword fighting me with his dandiya sticks. That’s when I smelled the flask literally and smelled the “coffee”, metaphorically, and realized, what an idea! I had to get a coffee flask of my own.

As I typed my query in amazon’s search bar, there was an avalanche of unrecognisable names among the sprinkling of a known few - Borosil, Milton, Cello et al. No problem. That’s what the filters are for. Ok, here we go - user ratings above 4 stars, capacity upto 500 ml, price less than 2000. Wait, this is no help. The flood has not subsided.?

I eventually had no choice but to revert to the good old scrolling, right clicking and opening in a new tab routine. The taxing bit was that apart from a few unique ones, most seemed like similar products (maybe manufactured in the same factories) sold under different brand names by different sellers. There are after all only so many angles you can click a product picture from.??

That got me thinking, not for the first time, about how much choice is too much choice. I’m not the first one to think about it of course. There are enough experiments and research on the #paradoxofchoice as the American psychologist Barry Schwartz likes to call it.

For those interested, you can read more about it in this article. It talks about how an interesting experiment by two other behavioral scientists piqued Shwartz’s interest in the subject, and how abundance of choice is not only impacting the coffee flask buying scene for people like me but also the dating scene on apps like Tinder.?

Research now shows that there can be too much choice; when there is, consumers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they do buy, they are less satisfied with their selection.

It isn’t just about #choiceparalysis and #buyersremorse but also about the quality of energy. There’s only so much high quality thinking energy that one has in a day. As you spend much of it pondering over and evaluating the multiple buying choices, other important decisions during the day will get less of that high quality energy.

While the problem is real enough, the possible strategies to handhold the customer through the choice paradox are extensively documented and well implemented(in some cases) too – things like filters, comparisons, recommendations(Amazon’s Choice).?But why create this “too much choice” problem in the first place and then go about trying to solve it. To answer that, let’s try and understand #marketplaces a little better. A marketplace, simply put, is a place where seller and buyers can meet - So 亚马逊 , Flipkart , Zomato and even Uber .?

1. The basic structure of a marketplace(online and offline) revolves around enabling a free flow of sellers and buyers and letting them figure out the rest. Of course, the products/services must be legal as per the law of the land and any over the top predatory practices by the sellers should be curtailed. So yeah, no controlling the number of sellers as long as what they sell is legal.
2. Structure aside, the relevance of an online marketplace depends on industry #fragmentation i.e. products having a large number of sellers and the top 3-4 sellers not controlling the bulk of the market share. Otherwise what’s stopping those 3-4 players from reaching out to customers directly and saving on commissions to the marketplace. Therefore, a fragmented restaurant industry is a better case for a marketplace (Zomato, Swiggy) than a consolidated one like automobiles or SIM cards?
3. Then, there is the question of #liquidity, which is defined as the probability that a user gets what he came looking for on a marketplace, and buys it. The Search to purchase success. These are human beings we’re talking about here. They don’t want a coffee flask but a golden insulated coffee flask with a black cap and a sipper. Phew, people! More sellers means a higher probability that the buyer finds what she is looking for and doesn’t venture to a different website or out of his home to buy it off the shelf.
4. Last and definitely not the least is the sheer economics at play. Money is needed for #useracquisition (offers and discounts), #retention (same day delivery, easy returns), recruiting top talent, better tech, and more. More sellers means more commissions.

So yeah, the answer's not that straightforward. But a solution is needed nonetheless. What do we do then? I’m sure there are many brilliant minds inside the industry crunching data, figuring out patterns, treading the thin line, and trying to course correct. And things might have gotten better, but the finish line is still some miles away.

The question that begs an answer is that is there an inflection point after which the highly coveted metric of number of sellers stops making an actual incremental impact on the revenue i.e. a buyer would have bought regardless from a different seller. And can the marketplaces, while respecting privacy, do an even better job at curating the buyer’s journey and make it more personalized, and hence simpler.

As for me, I almost gave up the coffee flask chase but had wasted enough time to waste some more. Damn you, sunk cost fallacy!

P.S: LinkedIn doesn't allow images. In case you're interested in seeing what I bought after a zillion hours, the same article on Medium has an image of it. Here.