Alternatives to Pagination on Product-Listing Pages
Summary: Infinite loading and Show More buttons can provide smooth interaction when loading products.
Many ecommerce sites are moving away from traditional pagination controls to opt for design patterns with slightly lower interaction cost. Should you adopt these patterns? It depends on the number of products you offer.
Traditional pagination involves splitting a list of items into multiple pages, each containing a fixed number of items. To see more options, users must navigate to the next page — typically by clicking or tapping a Next button at the top or bottom of the screen. Each page is numbered, and users can move to specific number pages by selecting their corresponding buttons.
Mega retailers like Amazon should stick with traditional pagination controls, because these offer precise control as shoppers explore their enormous product sets. Additionally, sites with few products or good loading performance may be able to simply load all products on the page at once.