Tell People to Take Stuff Out of Their Cart…We’re Serious.

Summary

Brain Driven Brands: Episode Summary Title: Tell People to Take Stuff Out of Their Cart…We’re Serious.
Host: Sarah Levinger
Release Date: July 10, 2025

In this insightful episode of Brain Driven Brands, hosts Sarah Levinger and Nate Legos dive deep into the psychology of consumer behavior, specifically focusing on how limiting choices can enhance e-commerce conversions and reduce cart abandonment. Drawing from neuromarketing strategies employed by nine-figure brands, the duo explores actionable tactics that any e-commerce business can implement to optimize sales and engage customers more effectively.

---

1. Introduction and Setting the Stage (00:00 - 03:32)

The episode kicks off with Sarah and Nate returning from vacation, quickly transitioning into the primary topic: the impending Black Friday season and its significance for e-commerce brands. Sarah highlights the importance of preparing for the busiest sales period of the year, mentioning her Core Identity Mapping (CIM) strategy aimed at understanding customer behavior during holidays.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah (01:12): "This year, I'm planning on running my own CIMs during the Black Friday season so that I can get data on how people are acting during the holidays."

Nate humorously attempts to explain CIM, emphasizing its value in shaping content and product strategies.

---

2. Understanding Choice Overload and Cognitive Overload (03:26 - 07:59)

Sarah delves into a Twitter post that didn’t gain as much traction as she hoped, centered around the concept of choice overload and cognitive overload—situations where too many options overwhelm consumers, leading to decision fatigue and cart abandonment.

She shares a compelling story about a 1950s Los Angeles shoe salesman who found that when presented with three choices, customers were less likely to make a purchase compared to when offered only two options.

Notable Quote:

• Scotty (04:37): "When they had a choice of three, they bought none. And when they had a choice of two, they bought one."

Sarah extrapolates this concept to modern e-commerce, proposing a strategy where websites limit the number of items a customer can add to their cart before prompting them to remove items. This approach aims to reduce overwhelm and encourage completion of purchases.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah (05:14): "People see too many options and decision fatigue kicks in. They start like second guessing themselves and their purchases. Do I really need this?"

---

3. The Psychology Behind Cart Management (07:59 - 12:30)

Nate and Sarah discuss personal shopping behaviors that mirror the proposed strategy, such as adding multiple items to a cart only to narrow down choices later. Sarah emphasizes that the cart should not be viewed merely as an "add to cart" action but rather as a "save for later" feature, akin to a Pinterest board.

She introduces the concept of agency—the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own choices—and how controlling the number of items in a cart can guide customers towards more deliberate purchasing decisions without feeling manipulated.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah (08:30): "The brain is trying really hard to make quick decisions. Do I need to waste energy on this or not?"

---

4. Decision Fatigue and Its Impact on Sales (10:14 - 12:30)

The conversation shifts to decision fatigue, a state where the brain's ability to make decisions deteriorates after a long session of decision-making. Sarah explains how this phenomenon contributes significantly to cart abandonment and customer churn.

She cites statistics indicating peak cart abandonment between 6 PM and 9 PM, attributing it to the cumulative decisions customers make throughout the day. Conversely, she notes that purchases are more likely to occur on Mondays when customers are more rested and capable of making thoughtful decisions.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah (11:34): "The brain is trying really hard to make quick decisions. Do I need to waste energy on this or not?"

---

5. Implementing Choice Architecture in E-Commerce (12:30 - 17:03)

Sarah introduces the term Choice Architect, advocating for marketers to design the decision-making environment for consumers thoughtfully. By strategically limiting options and providing social proof (e.g., "Most of our customers choose the 12 pack"), brands can guide customers towards preferred actions without restricting their freedom to choose.

Nate aligns with this approach, emphasizing the importance of directing customers effectively to enhance sales outcomes.

Notable Quotes:

• Sarah (15:45): "We need to stop calling ourselves growth marketers and we need to start calling ourselves choice architects."
• Nate (16:41): "We have so much control over what they buy and how much they buy."

---

6. Practical Applications and Future Discussions (17:03 - 19:38)

Wrapping up the episode, Sarah and Nate discuss potential tests and strategies to implement the discussed theories, such as highlighting best-selling products or creating targeted landing pages that simplify choices for customers. They tease future episodes that will delve into the psychology of bundling products to further optimize sales.

Sarah encourages listeners to join her community for more in-depth knowledge on psychological marketing strategies, while Nate promotes his own podcast, offering actionable insights with a focus on practical applications.

Notable Quote:

• Sarah (18:42): "We can't use like hacky shit anymore because the brain is going to constantly filter out and do its own thing. So I would so much rather, you know, what to do from a psychology standpoint than just like accidentally do things but you didn't mean to do."

---

Conclusion

This episode of Brain Driven Brands provides a comprehensive exploration of how understanding and applying psychological principles—such as choice overload, decision fatigue, and agency—can significantly impact e-commerce success. By adopting a role as Choice Architects, marketers can design more effective shopping experiences that guide customers towards favorable purchasing decisions, ultimately boosting sales and reducing cart abandonment.

---

Stay Connected:

• Sarah Levinger: Sarah's Twitter | Tether Lab
• Nate Legos: Nate's Twitter | Tactical and Practical Podcast

Brain Driven Brands is part of the Learn and Laugh series on the Quickfire Podcast Network and is presented by Tether Insights. For more information, visit tetherinsights.io.

Transcript

[Sarah Levenger]

Foreign.

[Nate Legos]

Welcome back to Brain Driven Brands. Sarah and I are only one episode back from vacation, but we're already, like, in top form.

[Sarah Levenger]

I feel like we're doing great. You and I are peak performance podcasters, the ppp. And also, we're really good at. We're really good at our jobs. Welcome back. It's been a while. You've been on vacation, and so have I, and so has Scotty. Everybody's out o o t o. Yeah, it's summer.

[Nate Legos]

Everyone got through Father's Day. I was like, let's get out of here for a couple weeks, which is the right thing to do.

[Sarah Levenger]

Yeah, I agree.

[Nate Legos]

And now it's time to lock back in Black Fridays in, like, in five months, four and a half months or something. It's coming up quick.

[Sarah Levenger]

I sent a text message to somebody last week that was like, did you know Black Friday is coming? And then I sent them, like, a Game of Thrones reference, and they were like, don't do that. I was like, just. Just throwing it out there. Black Friday is coming, people. The busiest season of the year is about to hit in literally, like, two months.

[Nate Legos]

So I built our promo calendar out today for the rest of this year and through Valentine's Day because I'm an overachiever, but there's only, like, four promotions before our Black Friday sale. Like, it's.

[Sarah Levenger]

That's it.

[Nate Legos]

It's not a lot of.

[Sarah Levenger]

Oh, my God. That's not a. That's not a lot at all. Oh, that makes me scared. I am. I'm lucky enough that I don't work predominantly on the, like, scheduling side with brands. I'm more in market research and all kinds of stuff. But this year, I'm planning on running my own cims during the Black Friday season so that I can get, like, data on how people are acting during the holidays. And if you don't know what a CIM is, I run core Identity mapping, you know.

[Nate Legos]

Sarah, shut up. You're bad at selling this. Let me try for you. Okay? You're. You're terrible at explaining what this is.

[Sarah Levenger]

No, this is probably a fine product.

[Nate Legos]

No, listen, Sarah has this thing called a cim. Couldn't tell you what. What it stands for. I don't really understand how she got all this information, but what she delivered back to us gave us our entire content and product strategy for the next 24 months. Like, that's what we paid for. We've executed on some of it already, and it's gone well. Like, it is just. You're paying her to Give you a roadmap of who your customers are, what they want, and how you can tactically get more of them. So there. Clip that. That's your better sales pitch.

[Sarah Levenger]

Thank you.

[Nate Legos]

Because I'm so tired of hearing you explain like it's a. It's a picture based survey. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. The survey was gibberish to me. Made no sense, but it spit out, like, the most actionable insights we've ever gotten about our customers.

[Sarah Levenger]

So my cheeks hurts.

[Nate Legos]

There's what it is.

[Sarah Levenger]

Thank you. I need to hire you to market. It's free this morning. I have learned over time that you should not market your own business. That's different from creating content for your own business, but you shouldn't market your own business because you're too close to it. And this is the problem that Sarah's had for years. It's like, I can't describe what I do very well. Nate can describe it way better than I can because I'm just like, oh, picture based service based on psychology and neuroscience, behavior science. And you're like, what the.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah.

[Sarah Levenger]

But then Nate comes in and he's like, no, no, no. Let me tell you exactly what it is that Sarah does. And very eloquent. So I appreciate that.

[Nate Legos]

There you go. Yeah. Just for that, what are we talking about today?

[Sarah Levenger]

Follow up question. Did you see any of my tweets this week? No, because I want to talk about one of my tweets, but if you saw it, then it's not going to be fun, so. Okay, you didn't see it. All right.

[Nate Legos]

Nope. Tart.

[Sarah Levenger]

All right, so we talked about.

[Nate Legos]

I can open up a tab with your. Your. Your Twitter right now.

[Sarah Levenger]

You don't listen or follow any of my stuff because you get like an hour debrief every Friday anyways.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah, I figured you'll tell me the.

[Sarah Levenger]

Highlights, which I do every Friday, by the way.

[Nate Legos]

Here we are.

[Sarah Levenger]

Jesus Christ. Okay. All right. So this week I posted a post that did not get enough attention, and I'm a little pissed about it. This One post got 1,859 views, which, again, I don't. Sarah tries not to get super deep in the weeds of views and likes and shares, but there's some content that I'm freaking excited about, and nobody in D2C gives it enough credit because I'm like, guys, okay, so this was the post, right? People, we've talked about this a lot. Get very overwhelmed, right, when choices or options go up, right? We talk about choice or, like, cognitive overload. You can't give people a lot of options in front of them because they dip out. Now, I found this piece of content that was suggesting something very interesting that I want to see if you'd be willing to test. I think this might be too racy for you.

[Nate Legos]

Racy. Okay.

[Scotty]

There's a story about a shoe salesman in Los angeles in the 1950s, and a journalist asked him, what's your secret? And he said, two, not three. If a woman comes into my store, I'll bring her a pair of shoes. She'll try them on, and she'll say, could I see that pair, please? And I'll bring her a second pair of shoes. And she said, could I also see that pair, please? And he'll say, which one would you like me to take away?

[Sarah Levenger]

Oh.

[Scotty]

Because what he found.

[Nate Legos]

Wow.

[Scotty]

Is when they had a choice of three, they bought none. And when they had a choice of two, they bought one. Ah, I love that. Right? Two, not three. Too much choice is overwhelming.

[Nate Legos]

Oh, man.

[Scotty]

I need to apply that to my life.

[Nate Legos]

You see, that's brilliant.

[Sarah Levenger]

Too marketing racy, which is saying something because Nate basically tests anything I tell him to test. So what this content was basically suggesting is if you want someone to convert on your site, don't give them unlimited options and let them make the final decision. Instead, do this. Step one, allow add to carts, but only up to a certain amount of number of items. Ooh, a certain number of items. Step two, if they hit that number and want to add more, add a pop up that says, before we add this to your cart, is there anything you'd like to remove? Remove in particular? Step three, then you let them choose which items they want to take out of their cartoon, and then they can continue forward and purchase. Now, there's some psychology behind this, but I want to get your initial reaction.

[Nate Legos]

I can see where this is going.

[Sarah Levenger]

You can? Okay. I was like, nate, we'll get this.

[Nate Legos]

So, all right, so we've done something not exactly like this, but similar. When we have new launches, we will highlight the scarcity of it and we will say, please only take one.

[Sarah Levenger]

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Nate Legos]

Like, please only reserve one for yourself so more of our customers can go in. Every time we say that, people buy more than one.

[Sarah Levenger]

So technically speaking, what you're doing is correct. Right. So you're using like urgency, scarcity a little bit in here because they can only buy one. You're also using anchoring effect because you're telling them you can only have one of these. If they buy more, though that's technically Kind of up to them, like, whatever. Right? Like we want to limit it to one you're going to buy more. Whatever it is. This is a little different because what we're technically doing is controlling for what we call agency. Do you. I don't know if you know what agency is. Not like agents see agency when it comes.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah, those are guys I hate on Twitter.

[Sarah Levenger]

No, not like.

[Nate Legos]

No, no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

[Sarah Levenger]

Like human agency. Right. So autonomy. You could say it that way too. So in this particular, like style or test. Psychological test, what we're basically doing is helping people. Sounds terrible. Helping people learn self control by not adding 18 things to their cart, getting overwhelmed that there's that many things in their cart, looking at the price and saying, I'm out guys and bouncing. So. And I knew this is why I put this in this post. Like before you come at me and say like, I want people to buy more, why the hell would I ask them to take stuff out of their cart? The psychology behind this is like, people see too many options and decision fatigue kicks in. Right. So they start like second guessing themselves and their purchases. Do I really need this? Like, should I just come back later? They just abandoned cart because it's just too much to think about. But if we limit their cart for them, like just slightly, you can kind of create this moment of reflection a little bit. And it's, it's not a blocker. It's more of like a nudge. It's just like, do you want this or do you want to change something in here?

[Nate Legos]

What's, what's super interesting is like, this is how I shop online, but I don't think I've ever consciously realized what I'm doing. I will. No, no, yeah. I will add, like, when I'm not exactly sure what I'm gonna buy, I'll add like three or four or five things to my cart to like get a short list down. And then I'll go in there, be like, all right, I only want this one. But I wanted to see them all to, to together. And there are definitely times where I see four of them and I'm like, I don't know. And then I bounce.

[Sarah Levenger]

Okay. Yeah, yeah. The only time I've ever do do that is on Amazon. I shop that way on Amazon. I will add a whole bunch of things to my, to my cart and then I'll go, sorry. I show up on Amazon, people. I'm sorry. Sometimes I just can't find.

[Nate Legos]

It's a great wife thing to Do.

[Sarah Levenger]

I just have to find it on Amazon? Because it's easy. So I'll go throw things in the cart and then remove like three or four things that I just like. I don't really want that. And then just buy the things that I want. Now if this is happening on Amazon, it's happening in your cart too. Your cart is not an add to cart. It's not a purchase intent. Stop thinking of it that way. Add to cart has no basis on purchase intent. It's a save for later button. Yeah, it's just so I can keep things somewhere almost like a. Almost like Pinterest. It's just like a mini Pinterest board. Basically, people just pin it up there, go, oh, this looks nice. And then come back later and say, do I really want this? If you do this though, you can cut down on the amount of time it takes for them to make that decision. And that's why I kind of love this. That's why I was pissed when it didn't do well on Twitter because I was like, guys, you don't understand. This is so interesting. You're basically generating the mental model for them. Yeah, they already do it. You might as well just do it for them.

[Nate Legos]

Do you think, like, how big of a issue is like, decision fatigue or like paralysis by analysis? Because I've been thinking about it more and more and like, we are further narrowing the amount of watches we're advertising for the rest of this year.

[Sarah Levenger]

Okay.

[Nate Legos]

And I've just been thinking a lot about, like, we've all heard the stats of, like, how many ads we see a day and, like, how many decisions we make a day. Like, do you think brands just, like, as a whole should be thinking about this more?

[Sarah Levenger]

I think so. I. I honestly think decision fatigue is probably one of the biggest factors in a cart abandonment. And also Churn, I think, has a lot to do with it as well, because especially when it comes to ingestibles, different than your industry. But if you're ingesting anything and the behavior is that I buy like six bottles of whatever it is just because that was offered to me during checkout, then I bring them home, I'll go through half of a bottle and then I'll forget, or it'll go to the back of the pantry or, like, something will get moved and then I'll find them six months later and be like, ah, crap, I was going to take all of these. Right. So behavior comes into this a little bit because the decision to actually purchase more things also requires energy. So that's why sometimes people will stock up but then never come back. It's also why some people will add to cart but never check out. All of this comes down to how much energy does the brain have to actually expend on your product, on saying yes to your brand. Because the brain, the only thing the brain is supposed to do is keep you alive. That's it. It's not supposed to like go through watches. It was not built to scroll shopify source.

[Nate Legos]

That's not what it was.

[Sarah Levenger]

That's not what it's designed for. Who would have thought the only thing the brain is supposed to do is give you alive. And the brain, little squishy three pound organ mostly made of water and fat.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah.

[Sarah Levenger]

The only thing it does all day long is conserve energy. It consumes about 20% of the glucose you take in on a daily basis. That's a lot. Yeah, 20.

[Nate Legos]

I drink a lot of Red Bull.

[Sarah Levenger]

Got to feed the brain to just the brain. So the brain is trying really hard to make quick decisions. Do I need to waste energy on this or not?

[Nate Legos]

Yeah.

[Sarah Levenger]

That's why typically you'll see cart abandonment goes up at the end of the day because people can't make a decision. They've already made so many decisions. The hours between I've read a stat on this somewhere between 6pm and 9pm is the highest cart abandonment like section of the day. Because people just can't, I can't make any more decisions. That's also the reason why typically you'll see people purchase things on a Monday because by the time they're done with the weekend they're rested and the brain can go back into like decision making mode. So yes, to answer your question, long winded answer, a hundred percent decision fatigue is real and it is massively killing a lot of brands.

[Nate Legos]

Would you suggest we test this like based on the number? Because something that I've thought about is like we know what the best selling watches. There's one watch that sells like twice as many units of anything else on our store. I want there to be something in the cart that when someone adds that watch, big hey congrats, you found it. This, that's our most loved watch. Don't look at anything else, just buy that.

[Sarah Levenger]

Like that'd be really interesting. I think that'd be a fascinating test.

[Nate Legos]

Cause like especially where like so many of our customers are women shopping for their guys.

[Sarah Levenger]

Yeah.

[Nate Legos]

They from our data don't know all the intricacies of like what different watches are and movements and everything. I so badly want to be able to run them to a landing page with that watch on it. You just be like, hey, this is it. Like, I promise you it's it. Just buy this one. It's the best one. Guys love it.

[Sarah Levenger]

I would. And I would attach some numbers to it. Say something like, 5,000 of our women who are buying for their husbands have purchased this specific watch. As compared to a hundred for this one.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah.

[Sarah Levenger]

300 for that one. Like, show them. Right? Like, all the women are buying this specific one. Yeah. I. I did this test for a CRO test for somebody in my school community, which Shameless Plug. Go join my community if you want to learn how to do more of this stuff. Thank you. Jim's book. Somebody was testing, like, how do I get people to purchase more in bundles? We could do a whole entire, like, episode on the psychology of bundling. Because there's. Let's do it because Serious psychology.

[Nate Legos]

Do you know how much our bundles are ripping right now?

[Sarah Levenger]

I bet a lot on it for us, which is crazy because, like, your prices are not cheap. It's not.

[Nate Legos]

Because for the longest time, we couldn't get anyone to buy more than one watch. We'll do it next episode.

[Sarah Levenger]

Okay? Next episode. Next episode will be a psychology of bundling, we promise. And hopefully we'll deliver. Okay? So for this student, though, they were talking about the fact that, like, I don't know how to get people to buy more because right now we have bundles of 3, 6, 12. Right. Of our particular product. How do I get people to understand that they should buy 12 of these and not the 6? Because the 6 is technically the decoy. Right? So if you know or have done a little bit CRO work, the decoy effect means if I have two options in a bundle and I add a third option, and typically people will always choose the middle option, whatever the mid range is. Right? That's. That's just how human brain works. For. For this particular person, they were like, I actually want them to choose the top tier. How do I do that? So my suggestion was add, like, a teeny, tiny button that's green, red, or orange and specifically write out. Most of our customers choose the 12 pack. Just. Just add it, like, right above the options of which ones they could pick. Most of our customers choose the 12 pack. And you do this so that people have a frame of reference to the brain is robotic context. It has no freaking clue. Is 12 a good option? Like, is that enough? Is that too much? It has no idea, like, how much is 12. And how long will that last me? Type of thing. But if you tell it, most people choose this option, then it has a frame to go back to and say, okay, I can baseline this. Most people choose 12, I should probably choose 12 too. So, yeah, it's fascinating.

[Nate Legos]

I like that. I think we all need to be doing like a better job at like directing our customers where to go and what to do once they're on our website.

[Sarah Levenger]

100%. All of this, I think 100% starts with we need to stop calling ourselves growth marketers and we need to start calling ourselves choice architects. I'm a choice architect. That's what I do. I do, I direct choice. That's all I do. I just get to do the end goal. That's it.

[Nate Legos]

I like that a lot.

[Sarah Levenger]

Because at the end of the day, that's technically what you're doing. When you're doing CRO level work or even any sort of website work, you're. You are architecting the path that they take to get to the end. The carrot at the end of the maze. Now whether they choose to take it is up to them. That's up to them. So this is how we stay ethical with this. You don't want to manipulate people, but you do have to send them somewhere. And most people hate it when you just go, hey, go off in that direction and figure it out for yourself. They hate it.

[Nate Legos]

Well, I think we've talked about before, like, I don't think we have any control over whether or not someone buys. I think we have so much control over what they buy and how much they buy.

[Sarah Levenger]

Yes. Yeah.

[Nate Legos]

And I think that's super underestimated. Like, no, you just got to tell people where to go, what to buy, why to buy it. Then some of them will and some of them won't, but at least the ones who will. You pointed them to what you wanted to.

[Sarah Levenger]

It is entirely up to them if they want to purchase from you or not. And if they don't, that's totally fine. Like, you could just be like, cool, come back later if you ever want to shop for this and that's the end of it.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah, we don't have a watch back on, dork. Go for it. Like I care, you know?

[Sarah Levenger]

Well, don't need to sit here and just constantly berate them with like pop ups and ups.

[Nate Legos]

How's that for an exit intent papa, by the way. Okay, nerd. I didn't want you wearing our watches anyway.

[Sarah Levenger]

I mean, if you were a more like cheeky brand, I would say do it but you might offend some people saying that. In general though, I think it'd be really interesting to test similar things. Right? Giving people a frame of reference, architecting where they go. But this one in particular, asking them, is there anything you want to remove from your cart? I want to see somebody test this because it sounds so backwards of like, why would I ask them to remove products from my cart? It's because they're going to do it anyways. I just don't want them to do it on their own without guidance. Yeah, I would like to be in control of saying, which one of these do you want to remove? Are you sure you want to remove the highest price one? Because that's the, that's the most popular one we have and people really like it and your husband will too.

[Nate Legos]

We're going to talk about this on the next episode about bundles because I've got some thoughts.

[Sarah Levenger]

All right. Where can people find you?

[Nate Legos]

They want me at Nate Legos on Twitter or you can listen to the Tactical and Practical podcast. It's kind of like this one, but there's less a Sarah yapping and more of me providing actionable insights. So if that's your, I'd love to have you over there.

[Sarah Levenger]

People love to hear me yap, I hope.

[Nate Legos]

No, I'm sure some do.

[Sarah Levenger]

Somebody told me the other day they were like, it's just so fun to listen to you talk. And I was like, that's great because that's not what my family says.

[Nate Legos]

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. I hate to hear the sound of my own voice.

[Sarah Levenger]

Jesus, stop talking. Okay, if you want to hear me yap more, you can follow me everywhere. You can see content at Sarah Levenger. Please come check out the school school.com backslash tether-lab that that place in particular is just full of psychology based marketers. We've got 140 some members now and all of them are running tests just like this. Mostly because psychology is how we do anything in marketing these days, guys. We can't use like hacky shit anymore because the brain is going to constantly filter out and do its own thing. So I would so much rather, you know, what to do from a psychology standpoint than just like accidentally do things but you didn't mean to do. So come check out the school. You guys will learn how to do more of that. Otherwise, have a lovely week. We'll see you on the next episode because now I'm interested to see what made.

[Nate Legos]

Let's talk about bundles.

[Scotty]

Brain Driven Brands is part of the learn and Laugh series on the Quickfire Podcast Network and is presented by Tether Insights. For more information, go to tetherinsights IO.