The Pros and Cons of Infinite Scrolling for E-Commerce

May 21, 2018   \   Posted by Above1 - Singapore Web Design Company
e-commerce

 

The infinite scroll is a feature that has been lot used in sites to trying to improve the usability in the pagination of elements. It basically works as follows: as you scroll through a list of elements in the browser, it loads new items on demand, waiving the click to perform paging, and all the control is done in the browser scroll. This optimizes the visualization of a wide variety of elements. Although it seems like an optimal solution for most cases, it also has its restrictions and should be used in the right context. For example, some cases where paging is important in usability; where full content is too big to be all loaded initially or where content is available in chunks like search results, blog posts and product listings.

Usage of infinite scrolling in e-commerce product listing pages

For contexts where scrolling is the primary method of content exploration, infinite scrolling can make users stay longer on your page, and thus increase focus / visibility. With the popularity of social media a huge amount of content is consumed every day. Infinite scrolling offers an efficient way to navigate this ocean of information without having to wait for pages to load. Infinite scrolling is a quasi-mandatory feature for discovery or advertising interfaces. When a user does not search for something specific, he needs to see a large amount of items to find something that pleases him.

Users have better experiences when they scroll the page than when they click or touch. The scroll buttons and touchscreens make scrolling easier and faster than clicking. For continuous and long content as a sales site, scrolling provides better usability than splitting text across multiple screens or pages. The smaller the screen, the larger the scrolling. The popularization of mobile navigation is another contributing factor to the use of infinite scrolling. The scrolling gestures on the mobile screens make navigation on long pages more intuitive and easy.

Loading speed is all for user experience! On infinite scroll pages, after full upload, all products or items are available for effective user viewing, without having to reload pages to advance the views.Content exposure is potentially greater for searching for large volumes of content. For example Google is one of the best examples of this; most of us rarely go beyond the first or second page of Google search results. The infinite scrolling prolongs the user's interaction, showing items with more interaction. The strategy of having the user navigate without having to select the next page falls like a glove in the strategies of the electronic commerce, since it allows the client to visualize a much greater number of products, increasing the chance of this user finalize a purchase in your store.

The light, simple and clean design for infinite scrolling is also important in e-commerce, as it does not tire the visualization of the websites, and the products / images are the only points or focuses of attention.

Disadvantages

Uploading a whole page and getting available can be an advantage, however, loading may be slow which implies that people may be disinterested in the site, resulting in low conversion rates. And those are bad news for anyone who uses infinite scrolling.

To reach a certain item of information, the user cannot mark their location to return later. If he leaves the site, all progress will be lost and the entire journey must be re-travelled to arrive at the same place. This inability to determine the scroll position not only causes confusion and annoyance to the user, but also harms the user experience as a whole.

Another negative point is the lack of footers, which usually exist for a reason, they accommodate information that users may need and when so, resort to this area of the screen. However, when the scrolling is infinite adds more and more data on the screen, it is pushed more and more out of sight, which causes you to have other alternatives to complement this failure.

Concluding, using infinite scrolling or not, is something that deserves a study with the target audience to set the best scenario as there are pros and cons.


In conclusion, Google Analytics is the best tool to improve the results of the pages and always attract more and more visitors, it is the mirror of reality and the answer to the questions that can lead us to success online.