We wrote a few months ago about the challenges of Large Product Lines. When you sell hundreds or thousands of products online, how do you organize your ecommerce website to help customers find them all?
If you have long lists of products, you probably break them up across multiple pages. That’s a common design, but here’s a scary metric: Once a product falls off the first page in a list, it becomes as much as 10 times less likely to be purchased. The chart below comes from one of our clients’ websites and shows a dramatic drop in buy clicks after page one.
Our client was missing sales because customers weren’t seeing products on page two. Now page two wasn’t exactly hard to find. There was a big “Next Page” link at the bottom of the page. All the customers had to do was click the link. But they just weren’t clicking it.
We could have done tests with bigger, brighter buttons and it might have helped. But we thought we could do better. What if customers didn’t have to click anything to see the next page? What if more products just appeared automatically?
New Interface: No-click paging
We opened up our techie bag of tricks and added some clever programming to the client’s website. We got rid of the “Next Page” link and made the site more responsive. Now, when a visitor scrolls to the bottom of the page, the next products appear automatically. As the visitor continues to scroll, more products just keep appearing.
No need to stop and click. We just keep the scroll momentum going and the visitor can keep browsing, effortlessly.
- See No-Click Paging on the Nina Designs website
The new interface seemed like a good idea. When we showed it to the client, they liked it. But how would their customers react? Would no-click paging actually deliver more online purchases?
Results: Double the Buy Clicks
We rolled out the new feature in an A/B test. For one month, we gave the old “Next Page” links to 50% of our website visitors, randomly selected. The other visitors got the new no-click interface. As we expected, there was still a drop-off in buy clicks on page two, even with the no-click interface. But the no-click interface resulted in a much smaller drop-off. In fact, our new no-click interface delivered twice as many buy clicks as the old interface for products on page two.
Strategy and Performance
Our client wanted to increase online sales. We used metrics-based strategy and good interface design to make it happen.
Matterform can help your small business grow revenue and work smarter. Contact Michael Herrick at michael@matterform.com or 505-750-3531 to start a discussion.
