Can reducing options improve your conversion rate?

Question

Whilst most websites (debatable) concentrate on adding new features and functionality, I would like to question whether reducing the amount of options you are providing to a user would aid their user experience?

Take the example, of tshirts. If you had 12 tshirts to pick from instead of 24, would this ultimately improve your conversion rate or reduce it?

A good example of this research is undertaken by Neil Patel here - http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/24/how-reducing-options-can-increase-your-conversions/

The NY Times example highlighted above with the jam might answer my question, but that's one example. Do you believe that this answer varies industry to industry? When trying to explain this to a client how would you best approach it and are there any famous / recent examples you could provide to fortify the claim "reducing your number of options to an acceptable level you show the user should in theory increase your conversions"

I'm almost certain HFI call this "Decidophobia". What an awful word.

Answer 1

I don't think that it's the quantity of products itself that is problematic, but more the way they are presented to the user.
Imagin that you have hundreds/thousands of products you want to sell on your website, in my opinion, the wrong choice would be to display hundreds of them on a grid across several pages, because It isn't attracting at all for the user, they might fell lost and might miss several products that they would have been interested by because of the enormous amount of information coming to their mind.

In this specific case I would recommend to divide the products page in several sections, for example one section for the new/highlighted products, one other for the most popular products, a search field, different categories etc...
In this way, your user will be able to reach an important amount of products but he won't fell lost.

Of course this is for products, for other things, the answer might be a little bit different.