Latest Item Count Increase
under review
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Emma - Citrus-Lime
Merged in a post:
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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Emma - Citrus-Lime
Merged in a post:
Show All or Load More Button for PLPs
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Will Condie
What are peoples thoughts on having a "Load More" button at the bottom of Product Listing Pages instead of "free scrolling" to loading in more items in?
Would this reduce load times and also allow us to get around the feature that hides out of stock items if there are too many item returned in the search?
We ask because we think there is merit to showing all products from a brand without forcing an ALP. That way customers who want to shop a whole brand can do so without having to filter or navigate too much away from their chosen brand.
Or
Could we have a new element added in the website URL structure, and say if you have /all at the start, then it would shows all products from that brand, irrespective of availability.
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Emma - Citrus-Lime
updated the status to
under review
Hi Tom and Adam,
Is this still a change you'd like to see?
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Adam Kappa
Emma - Citrus-Lime. I've been trying to figure out how best to word this since our last chat.
The ALP page has been a real pain point for our customers. At the moment, we show them the first 100 items, then make it an impossible puzzle to get to items 101–200. Increasing the item limit could be a good way of getting the overall item count to a more sensible level.
Ideally, though, we'd use F&F pages/Collections 100% of the time. Set the limit to unlimited, then waterfall the results in small batches.
Customers who only want to see the new stuff? It's at the top.
Customers who want to dig around for the cheaper stuff? Keep scrolling.
Want to narrow it down? Use the side filters.
It gives customers a much more natural way to browse, without artificially limiting what they can see or making them figure out how to access the next 100 products.
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Ben
Adam Kappa Emma - Citrus-Lime I agree with Adam. I had a relatively in depth conversation with James Steel last year about this. We came up with a compromise to make our large pages (brand pages and some category pages) work, however I still don't think it is the "best" UX. We have put a "There are more items, scroll back up to use the filters" type message at the bottom of the 100 items that display. But I would rather see a "Load More" or "Next Page" button there for customers who like to have a browse (and it would help us internally when looking through the ranges!).
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Emma - Citrus-Lime
Ben: Thanks Ben, and Adam. This is a great topic, and one that it's great to have your engagement on. I know James has also been involved in these discussions previously, and has also produced a blog post explaining his approach: https://citruslime.com/why-most-products-will-never-be-seen-and-why-thats-ok/
This is certainly something that's 'Under Review'. Leave it with us for now, and we'll soon be able to report back with some firmer proposals on where we go from here.
I'll also merge Ben's other post on the topic into this one.
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Adam Kappa
Emma - Citrus-Lime A couple things I forgot to mention earlier, as another reason for moving to F&F - ALP pages don't show coupon promotions, and if a customer searches for a term with a lot of products, they're only presented with a relatively limited subset of the available results.
If it ever came down to choosing between keeping ALP's or allowing F&F pages with waterfalling, we'd immediately switch over to F&F.
Thanks for looking into this, Emma!
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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.
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Tom Bowden
"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?
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Tom Bowden
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?
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Tom Bowden
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.
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Tom Bowden
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 category is a different story and I agree with Will Condie. 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. 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.
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Adam Kappa
Has there been any updates on this one? We're getting a lot of feedback from customers in the shop asking why they can only see 100 of the items when the site advertises that we have a lot more products available. Does it look feasible to add some kind of pagination/a load more button to the bottom of the pages?
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