Add paging to ALPs pages to allow all products to display
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Ben
We feel that ALPs pages offer a poor customer experience for the below reasons:
- Long lists of filters (that behave differently to regular filters)
- Filters that display do not hold the original query. So for instance if you had a page /onsale?discount=40 where you want to display all items over 40% discount, if you then click a filter (say /jackets) the link it takes you to would be /jackets/onsale and would not include ?discount=40. Making the campaign to sell items over a certain discount difficult.
- The items that display on the page are limited to 100 which is confusing for the customer who may just want to scroll items and if they do will currently think that is all the items that are available (we have had customer specifically tell us this)
2 examples of use cases on our site where ALPs pages are necessary:
- Brand Pages with lots of items
- Sale/Clearance (where we will often add a query like ?discount=40)
- Adhoc campaigns
We are aware we can customise these pages in design time, and have done so, but they still have their limitations and can require quite a bit of manual work per page if looking to maximise UX.
It seems in the Citrus Lime platform if you get to over 500 items the page begins to lag and ALPs become necessary (we had a scenario this weekend where a page with 1600 items crashed our customers (and ours when we had it reported) iPhones), we have therefore had to set our ALPs limit much lower. My overall preference would be that ALPs pages were not necessary and that the customer should be able to just start scrolling should they choose to. This is not unreasonable (for instance this page on John Lewis has 9000 items! https://www.johnlewis.com/browse/women/womens-dresses/_/N-flw). It looks like it John Lewis achieve this with paging.
EDIT: The issue mentioned above with lagging (that was happening on our site with just a few hundred items) was specific to our site which we have resolved with Citrus. The lag/page load now kicks in more around 1000 items.
If Citrus did not want to change how regular pages are handled then my suggestion would be to implement paging on Citrus ALPs. This would mean everything else behaving in a similar way to currently but if a retailer has the amount of products that load to be 100 then at the bottom a "Load More" (or better an auto load as you approach it) would load the next 100 items. This in my opinion would give a much better customer experience.
The other change would be to respect queries so in my example at the start of the post with /onsale?discount=40 it would pull through to any filters clicked.
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Steven Sproat
Just dropping it in that the quantity of products in a given category is also a product of how many colour variations there are. A helmet available in 6 colours = 6 products listed. One thing we've (and several other clients) have been asking for is "colour groups" but doesn't look like a thing that Citrus agree with.
James Steel
Hi Ben
Thank you for your feedback.
I'm looking forward to speaking with you directly about this soon.
In the meantime, I think your post breaks down into two distinct parts:
[1] The loss of URL Variables (specifically, in this case, ?discount=xx) when clicking through to sub-categories using the links on ALPs pages
[2] A desire to expand the volume of products on an ALP beyond the current limit of 100 (per automatic collection - Latest, Best Value) using a paging method.
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To address Point [1], I understand where you are coming from. For balance, I can see why this was not an expected scenario. No ALP will generate with a custom URL Variable (eg. ?discount=xx), so the navigation links that automatically present on an ALP would not expect to need to support them.
However, as it is possible to manually construct a URL (inclusive of a custom URL variable) that leads to an ALP, sustaining them through the user journey is a logical conclusion.
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To address Point [2], if I'm reading the above correctly, I believe I understand your perspective but we're not aligned with the conclusion that paging is required.
I've written an article that expresses my point of view, which is available here:
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When we speak, I can learn more about your perspective and experience, and also share more of my own.
But what I am certain of is that we want the same outcome for you and your customers!
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Ben
James Steel Appreciate the response. Will catch up next week but the crux of my point will be around getting the best of both worlds. ALPs pages could continue to exist as they are (kicking in at a retailer defined product threshold), but adding in a "Load More" or "Next Page" feature at the bottom. We moved away from bannered landing pages a year or 2 ago in favour of standard FAF pages with content/filter banners at the top. This was in line with what we felt gave the customer the best experience (for either a scroller or a filterer). It is also what you will find nearly all of the biggest ecom sites have been doing recently. Take a look at John Lewis, Asos, Marks & Spencer etc and they are all like this.
James Steel
Hi Ben
As always, a great discussion (with more to be had). As I mentioned previously, I want what you want: the best possible experience for you and your customers.
Canny (and all platforms like it) isn’t ideal for nuanced conversations such as this, so I’m looking forward to speaking next week. I’m confident we’ll reach a shared understanding and a clear set of next steps.
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For anyone else following this thread:
I agree that the examples Ben has shared support his position. For balance, it’s worth noting that - just like Cloud POS Ecommerce - those same retailers also use Landing Page and Collection experiences that guide visitors towards more focused result sets. It isn’t a binary choice.
Many large sites are also architecturally obliged to follow the design patterns they use. That doesn’t necessarily mean those patterns drive better engagement or higher conversion.
Independent research from the Baymard Institute, Nielsen Norman Group, and CXL consistently shows a steep (~80%) drop-off in engagement after the first 100–150 products on a listing page. Most users then return to navigation, perform another search, apply filters or exit the site.
Even where pagination or infinite scroll exists, the overall pattern of behaviour tends to remain the same.
What Ben and I are really exploring is how to strike the right balance between decision efficiency and content exposure for shoppers - while keeping the experience manageable for retailers. I’m confident our call will help to clarify that.
It’s a great topic, and one that’s well worth continued discussion.