usability - Infinite scroll vs Pagination in E-commerce websites

Infinite scroll has been around for a while now, however I have not seen infinite scroll being implemented on any successful or well known e-commerce sites.

Does anyone know of any e-commerce sites that use it, and also has anybody seen any tests been done on this topic?

e.g. Conversions increased or decreased when switching from pagination to infinite scroll.

I personally think infinite scroll would lend itself well to e-commerce, I would just like to see some hard numbers relating to it.

Answer

Etsy spent quite some time developing and testing infinite scroll in their search listings. They noticed fewer clicks on results and fewer items favourited from the infinite results page, and users stopped using the search interface to find products. They reverted back to traditional pagination. There's a good article about it here: http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

Nielsen Norman Group recently published an article (Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website) that argues infinite scrolling has advantages in some contexts but is probably not suitable if users are likely to want to backtrack or find specific information quickly.

For e-commerce sites, finding products by feature might be difficult to accomplish quickly if all of the products are presented linearly on a never-ending page, without sorting or other filtering or navigation techniques to help isolate the intended item. In addition, locating a previously found item on an extremely long page is inefficient, especially if that item is placed many scrolling segments down. It’s much easier for people to remember that the item is on page 3 than it is to gauge where the item is positioned on an extremely long page.

The article also describes how infinite scrolling can lead to the sort of behaviour that Etsy discovered, with fewer clicks and conversions:

With infinitely long pages, people may feel paralyzed by the sheer volume of content or the number of choices and not click anything. People may view but not act. Infinite scrolling may support browsing behavior, but it can cause inaction (and lower conversions), which is the opposite of what most website makers want.