Related Items 5 product limit
under review
Ben Kippax
under review
Ben Kippax
Sean @scott-hargrave-skiers-lounge-consultant I definitely agree, it is an aged article, but those were just a subset of really credible sources and the data still holds true in recent times that carousel items outside of the immediately visible range simply do not get attention.
I think the solution here would be to simply make the amount of related items visible on a product page configurable so that customers can find a sweet-spot for their customer-base. This would mean that items tile, in a grid, rather than slide in a carousel.
Would you be happy with this solution?
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Scott
Ben Kippax: yepp
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Sean
Ben Kippax: Hi Ben, yep this sounds a good solution, as long as the UX on mobile doesn't change. Would be great to understand how these products are ordered too because it seems like a price high to low currently which isn't particularly beneficial.
Ben Kippax
Sean: if I recall correctly, they aren’t ordered in any specific way, at present. Newest first, perhaps?
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Pasq
I find the related items thing a bit frustrating in that it is a big area we are missing out on extra sales opportunities to the main product viewed. So related items on the site words "you may all also like this". As far as I can tell or know you can only have similar items in the range. So if its a jacket, it only show jackets. For me I would like a viewer to look at a ski jacket and the "you may also like" show eg ski pants, a top, a hat, pair gloves etc that sort of thing, or for a ski, show ski boots, a helmet, goggles. More relevant or more specific you may like i think will get extra sales! Also related items show 5 items, with what looks like box 6 is missing, but if you did a style range, which shows up just above it, it 6 boxes!
Ben Kippax
Hi Pasq:,
By default, products would show items in the same product group, which we feel is better than showing no items at all (at the very least it improves the crawl and indexability of your site in search engines).
You can select a set of facets in which to display up-sell/additional items.
For example, I set 1 of your items (a ski jacket) to have a product group of ski-pants as a related item. This is now showing ski-pants in the related item section of your product page.
Note; if an item is in a product group, setting it on the master colour propagates that setting to all of the child colours, too ... win win.
Hopefully this helps you :)
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Pasq
Ben Kippax: Thank you, I'll look into it.
Ben Kippax
Hi Sean
I'm happy to be challenged on the number of products visible. I will concede that 5 is an 'odd' number here, since it could orphan the last child if we were to display the items in 2s.
That being said, I do not believe we should make them a carousel.
Generally speaking, carousels are often overlooked by users of websites and when they do get clicked, they're often only clicks on the items within the first slide.
Over the years we've done our own testing (albeit comparatively limited when looking at behemoths like Jakob Nielson Group) on this subject, with other customers websites and the data we collected corroborated what's already out there - "They don't provide a meaningful/measurable benefit". The trade-off of costs (performance being one of the main costs, in this case) vs. benefits is too high.
The Nielson Norman Group, widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on design usability suggest 5 or less items in a carousel, however they found in their tests that beyond what is visible initially, that items past the "first step" in the carousel are widely ignored.
There are some really useful articles on this;
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Sean
Ben Kippax: Hi Ben, thanks for the answer. I wasn't suggesting an automatic sliding carousel, simply the option to be able to scroll through more than five products on both desktop and mobile.
The Nielson article is from 2013 and I think lots has changed since then, including consumer behaviour. The cycling industry is often very different to other industries, being so specialist and I have seen positive results from offering more of a choice. The behaviour exists on a mobile device currently (ability to scroll through products) but is fixed on the desktop to the 5 product limit.
Carousels can be used for different reasons, whether its a cross-sell or an up-sell and the behaviour can be different for both. If I want to offer different cross-sells of products a customer should consider buying with their bike then more than five would be great.
In a perfect world we could have the five product limit but rank these products by popularity (whether it's revenue, stock, page views etc) but this currently doesn't exist...
You're no doubt closer to the performance side than I am so if there would be a noticeable slow down in product page performance then I can accept it's not worth progressing with.
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Scott
Sean: Agree with you Alex, a lots happened in the world, and with online beaviours in 7 years. People were only just starting to swipe right and left on dating apps back then :)