Etailers Don't: Too many pages

One of the ideas I came up with during the planning of The Etail Queen is to talk about good and bad features on online stores. This is the first of the Etailers Don'ts series, and there will be a series on Etailers Do's as well.

I mentioned in the first post that the #1 Etailers Don't is displaying items that are sold out, e.g.

Unfortunately there are other bad website designs.

You would've thought that etailers will do anything to minimise the distance between prospective customers and the item(s) of their desire. In the online world, clicks equal distance. The more clicks required, the more likely for the shopper to browse elsewhere.

That's why I don't understand why some etailers make us click, click and click again just to see their products. For instance, I have to click 6 times to see the following collection.

Unless you're ASOS or similar brands with thousands of items, 7 pages plus scrolling up and down is too much of a hassle. I would have given up.

And I found a worse example.

Not only is the number of items per page restricted:

But there are actually more than 5 pages of items to go through:

There may be more. Even for the purpose of research I couldn't be bothered finding out if there is a page 11.

This is the equivalent of walking into a store with multiple levels and each level only displaying 15 products. Do I really want to walk up all those stairs?

You may think that people like me are just lazy. But you know what? Etailers have to cater for their target audience, and if they have short attention span and don't like clicking a lot? You have to factor that into your website design.

Many online stores allow you to change the number of items on display each page. That caters for people like me who wants to see everything on the same page, as well as people who have slow internet connection speed so they may not want to load everything at once.

Country Road's e-store has another approach to item display - there are only 18 items on display per page, but you can see all of them without scrolling down. Hovering your mouse over an item magnifies the image.

I wish there is a horizontal scroll bar similar to the one on Shopstyle so you can move between pages easily but that is more of a nitpick.

Is this an Etailers Don't in your book? What drives you bananas when you're shopping online?