Is Pagination Good or Bad for Conversion Rates?

[gzlatin]

I'm in the middle of a redesign and I was planning on doing pagination where if there are more than 28 products on a page, it would automatically have the little #'s at the bottom of the page saying 1,2,3 for however many pages of products there are in that category. Is there any hard evidence out there whether or not this is good or bad for conversion rates? I see a lot of the big retailers do this but it could just be because they have a lot more products. My store is going to have about 1000 products.

[jsinger]

Good question.

little #'s

Yep, sites do all sort of cryptic things to indicate the page continues elsewhere. Mostly those efforts confuse me because the clues (and that's the best I'd call them) don't use plan text. Wonder how many "regular shoppers" understand bread crumb symbols >>>, for example?

[Peter Cornstalk]

Just look at amazon... pagnation with little << # >> at the bottom.

[sniffer]

I wonder if anybody could pull out some hit stats to see if they drop off after the first page. Im interested too, because I could be using this for another site.

My gut feeling is to avoid it nd try and create smaller categories

[jsinger]

I see a lot of:
Page 1 2 3 next >>

It would be interesting to catalog all the commonly used methods. No doubt traffic decreases (plummets?) after page 1, but it would also drop in the lower part of a very long page.

I'm the kind of guy who is still confused by those cryptic, but now universal, symbols on a tape player, ¦¦, >> etc And "EURO" type traffic signs sometimes baffle me...at high speed!

There MUST be a better way!

[Peter Cornstalk]

Do people walk into a store and look at the first shelf they see and leave if they don't see what they want?

They need to know what you got before they get there!

If not you need to convince them to use the search because you have what they want, no matter what it is they want.

That is a free one on me, next one cost money. ;)

[gzlatin]

I don't think your taking into account that this is not a physical store and all people have to do is click the back button. Brick and mortar and online stores are two completely different beasts. A good conversion rate for an online store is around 2% where as the conversion rate for a brick and mortar store is much higher.

I think I'm going to try to get about 50 products to a page and if it goes above that, i'll go to the next page. If I have over 100 products in a subcategory, i'm going to try and break it down even further and create more subcategories. That's the best solution I can think of at this point.

[sniffer]

I see a lot of:
Page 1 2 3 next >>

yeah and do you really want to rely on users a) seeing it, and b) knowing what it means?

Also, what if page one took a long time to load because it had 50 products on it. If you have to wade through 5 pages to get to what you're looking for its going to become a drag (problem with amazon imho, even after search)

[Raymond]

Conversion rate stays roughly the same in every page, but traffic plummets after page 1.

This is my assumption after running my site for almost 3 years.