With the availability of numerous eCommerce stores, online customers have a number of options to choose from. But what guides their decision-making when it comes to choosing the best store of them all? Can you guess?
The answer is twofold: the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX). How your website appears gives the first impression of your eCommerce store to your visitors. If it doesn’t look attractive, you won’t be able to make your visitors stay on your store. A good UI is followed by good UX. If your UI is remarkable but you’re failing to provide a convenient browsing experience to your users, you’re perhaps not going to see them back on your store.
To offer consumers a smooth and pleasant shopping experience, improving the UI as well as the UX is mandatory. Connecting the gap between the UX and UI is extremely significant for the success of an eCommerce store. eCommerce sellers use different tools and features in their online stores to make it more interactive and engaging. One such method to improve the UI and UX of an eCommerce website is infinite scrolling.
Remember, customers today are used to scrolling on social media, and they want to scroll on your eCommerce site. So, what is infinite scrolling and how can it help your eCommerce business? Read on to find out.
What is infinite scrolling?
Infinite scrolling, also referred to as endless scrolling, removes the pagination process from your store by providing automatic and continuous loading. As a user scrolls downs your page, the product list continues to populate. Consequently, customers don’t have to click on the next page or a 'load more' button at the bottom of the page to browse further.
There are tons of web design tools that help eCommerce retailers get rid of the traditional pagination system. You can include an automatic scroll on the product listing page and allow the customer to easily navigate through your store products on a single page.
Source: HansBrinker
Benefits of Infinite Scrolling for eCommerce Stores
Are you still wondering whether to implement this infinite scroll feature on your store or not? Here are some of the exciting benefits of this web design technique.
1. Infinite scrolling is timesaving.
As an eCommerce merchant, your main focus should be to maintain the user flow when they’re present in your store. A pagination process can disrupt the user flow and create frustration when shoppers go through a number of pages. Infinite scrolling, on the other hand, makes the browsing fascinating and efficient.
2. It offers easy browsing.
One of the main benefits of infinite scrolling is that it makes browsing easy. With the automatic loading of products, consumers just need to scroll to find their anticipated product. It’s also great for usability and navigation.
Customers are already familiar with a continuous feed and understand how it works. Social media has played a huge role in this, as most people have experienced scrolling through their social feeds.
Continuous scrolling makes it a simple task for shoppers to engage with your content. It also makes it easy to scroll on a mobile device. However, continuous scrolling can occasionally make a customer dig so deep that it will be challenging to reach to the top of the page again. For this matter, many websites have a “Go to top” button so that users can easily navigate to the top section of the page.
3. It increases session duration.
Let’s be honest: after browsing a number of pages, customers get fed up and tired to the point that they quit all results pages. This isn’t the case with infinite scrolling.
When merchandizes are exhibited continuously on a single page to the customers, they browse more items and spend more time on your site, which helps in increasing the average time spent by a customer on your website.
4. It offers fast browsing.
Consumers prefer fast loading. They just hate to wait for the pages to load. Clicking on the next page numerous times and waiting for lengthy load times can annoy your users.
Infinite scrolling solves this problem and keeps adding the next page content automatically. Customers find this way more expedient. It’s an effective way to load data or imageries. This is particularly true for image-heavy websites, as customers won’t need to wait for the entire web page or gallery to be preloaded. Additionally, infinite scrolling works well on mobile, where scrolling is the norm.
5. It's amazing for touchscreen devices.
In recent years, touchscreen mobile devices have profoundly dominated keypad devices. Nowadays, almost every consumer possesses a touchscreen mobile phone. This is why infinite scrolling is considered to be the best way and favored over pagination by eCommerce sellers. Take the example of Facebook. It's so simple to just use a thumb to navigate to different pages.
6. It creates more user engagement.
When content loads quickly, it makes a customer stay longer on the page. As a result, it increases customer engagement. Owing to the continuous appearance of products, customers find themselves interacting with your store for a longer period.
How to Take Advantage of Infinite Scrolling
Infinite scrolling has become a design trend for many websites and social networks. It’s also a useful technique for keeping users on your page for longer. But can it be used effectively for your eCommerce store? Follow these tips to make the most of infinite scrolling UX design:
1. Make it user-friendly.
Keep your thumbnails a practical size and optimize your images for the web for better page load speeds. Make your galleries as accessible as possible. Consider adding Filtering with Media tags and categories to help narrow down a search. Don’t save the best for last—after all, customers may never get there. Instead, include your better or more recent images upfront, which can help to create a better user experience.
Pogosticking occurs when you click on an item and you navigate away from the page. But when you go back, you are often returned to the beginning of the page rather than where you left off. To avoid this situation, use a gallery that doesn’t navigate away from the original page. For example, you can open images in a lightbox, so users don’t lose their position and can continue from where they left off.
Flickr is a good example in this regard. It remembers the user’s scroll position, so when the user presses the “back” button, they return to their original position.
2. Make visuals appealing with AR & 3D.
Want to take your eCommerce game one step further? Consider leveraging 3D and AR technologies for your product visualization. Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to transform mobile shopping by bringing products to life in front of you through 3D models that you can size up, examine from all angles, and even place in the environment around you.
You can increase consumer confidence and conversion online by implementing web-based 3D and AR commerce. Customers on your site can explore products in 3D in a variety of colors and textures, zooming in to explore product details up close and rotating the models to view every angle. Moreover, consumers can tap to AR to place the product in their world to better understand the size and dimensions or match the product to items they already own. At Threekit, we can help you make this experience available across devices and browsers—no app download required.
3. Offer immersive experiences.
As eCommerce businesses produce more content—from photos to videos—they face a new challenge: they must concentrate their investments on the experiences that drive procurement and offer differentiation in a congested field of rich media.
Immersive commerce, which includes AR and 3D product models embedded on the product page, fits the bill on both counts. This improved commerce allows consumers to place product models in real-life environments and manipulate product views, providing the context that’s essential to producing relevant, engaging experiences that fuel purchasers’ confidence to drive conversions and decrease product returns.
Businesses that choose images and immersion options that align with their purchasers’ objectives and requirements will be the ones that last and flourish as customers depend ever more heavily on digital and mobile shopping. ThreeKit provides technology that enables retailers to display two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and augmented and virtual reality images.
4. Leverage virtual photography.
Since the introduction of eCommerce, online merchants have depended on static two-dimensional (2D) photos to sell their merchandizes. That was typical practice for a few reasons. At first, online retail was more or less catalogs transposed to digital. And then, as eCommerce advanced, we didn’t essentially have the technology to easily offer anything other than 2D images. But things have transformed.
Last year, mobile commerce accounted for nearly 40% of all eCommerce. That’s significant because mobile customers shop in a different way than those on desktops. One of the major differences is screen size. When customers are seeing products on a smartphone, there isn’t much screen space for reviews and product descriptions. Even if there were, more than half of shoppers think images are more significant than text-based elements. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. That means visuals matter more than ever.
The good news is that it’s easier and more economical than ever to deliver exceptional visual representations of your products. Virtual photography lets you generate better-than-perfect images of merchandizes at a fraction of the cost of customary photography. Virtual photos have become so high-quality that consumers can’t tell they’re computer-generated. Plus, because they’re computer-generated, you can produce these images even before the physical product is ready.
Image created with Virtual Photographer
5. Allow customization.
Customers used to be enchanted by the simple ability to shop from their couches. Now, they’re coming to expect technology like the AR apps that let them visualize products in their homes. Not only that, but many merchants offer customers the ability to alter colors and other product features with the click of a button so they can immediately see exactly what they’re ordering.
As more shopping is moving online and onto mobile devices, offering customers the ability to visualize exactly what they’ll get—in the actual context they’ll use—is becoming increasingly important. This is especially true for retailers who sell higher-ticket items. Customers will be much more willing to order a sofa from an eCommerce shop when they’ve seen it in their living room using AR and are confident it fits and matches the current decor. Without those guarantees, shoppers are often hesitant to order something that might not work—and that could, therefore, turn into a difficult and expensive return.
Let’s face it: if you’re not offering buyers the ability to visualize your merchandise exactly as it'll be used, customers will order them from a competitor who’s offering that capability.
Conclusion
Customers love the infinite scrolling feature. It improves their user experience and keeps them engaged in your store. Our guess is that that’s a sufficient reason for you to make this feature available on your eCommerce store.
At Threekit, we have partnered with Shopify , Magento , SAP Commerce Cloud , Salesforce and WooCommerce to offer eCommerce retailers and others the opportunity to let shoppers view and customize their products in 3D and AR. Vendors on these marketplaces can now customize items in real-time, show customized products in AR, and use Threekit’s Virtual Photographer to replace physical photo shoots. Many of the merchants already using these new options are reducing product returns and offering a more pleasant shopping experience for customers.
Imagine what you can do with 3D and AR incorporated into your eCommerce website along with infinite scrolling. It’ll keep your customers glued to their screens and your sales will skyrocket within no time! Get in touch with us today and our product visualization experts will explain how you can leverage the endless scrolling trend on your eCommerce site.
