"Larger Result Sets - Shopping Via Department / Category"

With larger result sets, our largest is t-shirts and 3000 plus. The older season gear is very hard to shop. This can been seen in the reducing margin (as you'd expect) but increasing weeks cover (which you wouldn't)

On reflection "Load More" wouldn't work, as it would be too slow to load large results. Maybe pagination is worth a look?

I'll flesh this out with a few screen shots.

"Latest Item Count Set To 100"

In Carhartt SS24 we have 285 items. With the URL https://www.workingclassheroes.co.uk/carhartt/ss24/male you can view all of the items.

There is a great benefit to using an alps page (sign posts work a treat). But an alps page is limited to count of 100, so you can't view the new season range in one.

If 500 is a maximum item count on non alps pages, could this also be the maximum count on an alps page?

Whilst shopping via brand, the best way to get customers "on the product", is with an ALPS page. If sign posted right, this works extremely well in getting the conversion. We find it a bit of work but well worth the effort.

It would be good to see more than 100 items on ALPS page. The Maximum Item Count is 500, I don't see / experience any speed issues here.

One of our main brands has over 300 styles per season, so with a forced ALPS page we can only show 1/3 of new season gear by scrolling.

Shopping via this method will generate larger results sets, plus increasing numbers of potential sign posts. For example, on our site if you chose to shop via "T-Shirts", it will provide over 3000 results. Clearly it's not wise to load all of those. However an ALPS page throws up issues, as it contains 181 brands. And generating an ALPS page with effective signposts for 181 brands is unwise and would lead to poor user experience. I can see the need for "load more" in these circumstances.

We have lots of old seasons gear that is reduce to clear, but people can't find it. Low margin, high weeks cover, the worst kind of stock. In fact, as the season gets older and the margin decreases, the WC goes up, and I'd expect the opposite.

We are growing and therefore increasing our COGOH, but our old season gear mountain in growing too.

I'm possibly sharing a bit too much here, but I suspect our experience the last 12 months is the same as everyone else's. Our gross margin is down by 3%. The loss is not on new season gear, but old season gear going for cheaper then it used to. Many factors at play here, but if our platform could help out with this, that would be mega.

The "load more" button would open this gear up and I'm quite sure we would see a decrease in weeks cover (then I could push the margin up a bit).

I suspect somewhere between "speed" and "number of items" there is an optimum.