Finding the Right Number of Products to Show on Shopify Pages
- The big picture: Displaying the right number of products per search results page is crucial to balance value and choice overload. A large number of products shown capture higher inventory breadth but risk frustrating customers.
- Why it matters: Methodically testing different configurations against core UX and performance metrics allows you to find the ideal balance for your specific store and business goals.
In this Article
Understanding Shopify's Product Display Settings
Throughout its 17-year existence, more than 7.36 million online stores have been created on Shopify. However, only 4.7 million websites are currently live. Nevertheless, Shopify remains a popular choice for many businesses globally—from general stores to specialized dropshipping stores.
The setup: When merchants add products to their stores, they have configuration options that determine how those products appear to shoppers browsing the site. Shopify provides merchants flexibility, allowing them to set anywhere from 8 to 50 products per page—the default figure is 20.
Why this setting matters: It impacts conversion rates, site performance, customer satisfaction, and how quickly customers find what they need. The more products there are, the longer search indexes crawl the site to identify matching results. Understanding how many items to display requires careful consideration of your target market and customer preferences.
Bottom line: Merchants must balance display quantity with a smooth, customer-friendly browsing experience powered by their product information management system. There’s no single exact number that works for every e commerce business.
Key Factors That Impact Product Display
User Experience Considerations
Customers who visit your eCommerce website develop attitudes and emotions that determine purchase decisions. According to research, less than four out of every one hundred site visitors take a desired action on eCommerce sites—making customer satisfaction critical to your business strategy.
Critical UX factors:
Page load time: The number of products displayed per page significantly influences loading speed. More products mean more images and content to load. Research shows that at least two in one hundred site visitors will convert if the page loads in 2.4 seconds. Any slower, and conversion rates drop. Merchants should test load speeds at different settings using tools like digital asset management software to optimize image delivery and meet customer preferences for fast browsing.
Mobile responsiveness: With over 70% of eCommerce traffic now coming from smartphones, optimization is essential. Displaying too many products horizontally creates issues on mobile screens—products get shrunk down too small. Similarly, showing too many products vertically with endless scrolling degrades mobile user experience. Your product selection display must work seamlessly across devices to attract customers effectively.
Navigational ease: How your store displays and paginates product listings affects browsing difficulty. Too many pages with minimal products force extra clicking. Too many products per page requiring intensive pagination can deter browsing and increase search abandonment rates. Product catalogs need the right balance based on content structure, available facets, and product volumes. Understanding your market through market research helps determine optimal navigation patterns.
Design Aesthetics and Visual Appeal
The way products are visually presented on Shopify search pages significantly impacts aesthetics for customers. Two primary design choices influence display, and understanding which works for your specific niche gives you a competitive advantage:
Grid vs. list view: Shopify allows merchants to display products in different formats:
Grid View | List View | |
Product Images Shown? | Yes | Optional, can display without |
Visual Layout | Products are displayed in a tiled visual grid and organized by rows—a more visually engaging and storytelling format. | Products are displayed in vertical list format, showing key details like title, price, and summary—a more practical layout. |
Key Product Details Shown? | Limited, including title, price, rating | Robust, can display descriptions, title, price, availability |
Type of Shopper Intent Catered To | Browsing, discovery | Research, comparison |
Products Per Page Possible | Lower, limited by image sizes | Higher, more can fit without images |
Visual Storytelling Capabilities | High, product photos allow strong aesthetics | Limited for driving visual quality and appeal without images |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Benefits | Lower, less information on the page | Higher, ability to display more data per product |
Load Speed Differences | Images require more size/bandwidth, so slower | Faster load times as less visual data |
Path to Purchase | Allows more emotional, human connection | More practical, it may require an extra click to view the product image |
Visual Alignment Needs | High, more attention to spacing, rows, padding | Less important, more detail-focused layout |
With grid view, design aesthetics are heavily influenced by product images. This allows more visual browsing but constrains products per row. List view prioritizes textual information, allowing more products per page but limiting visual quality. Your choice should align with your business strategy and what market research shows about your target market.
Image size and quality: The size and quality of images impact how you display products. Showing more products per page requires shrinking image sizes, sometimes reducing quality and clarity. Small, grainy images degrade the aesthetic experience, lowering click-through rates. Prioritizing higher-quality product photography from your digital asset management system, even at the expense of fewer products shown, often improves metrics. Asset management tools help maintain consistent image quality across all sales channels—critical for both traditional stores and dropshipping businesses.
Product Type and Industry Considerations
The types of products a Shopify merchant sells significantly impact optimal products per page. Market research into your specific niche and customer preferences should guide your approach. Consider a power tools manufacturer operating a storefront:
High vs. low complexity products: Industrial power tools like pneumatic drills or laser measurement devices have complex specifications that business buyers research thoroughly. Displaying too many advanced listings without adequate whitespace means less room for rich product descriptions, comparison charts, and diagrams. Brands may want fewer products per page to balance detailed product visibility. Basic accessories like replacement parts have less research complexity, enabling more products per page. Understanding which certain products require detailed presentation helps optimize your product selection strategy.
Varied product sizes & shapes: When product dimensions vary drastically—like showing tools alongside replacement parts in multi-category stores—flexible container sizes that scale appropriately are optimal. Product management should aim to represent sizing truthfully. Evaluating these factors by product category helps determine layout, spacing, and quantities that showcase offerings appropriately. This is especially important for dropshipping stores working with multiple supplier relationships.
Benefits of Showing More Products
Displays Full Product Range and Variety
If merchants maximize the products displayed per search, they can showcase broader catalog breadth. This highlights the vast assortment available, giving you an advantage in competitive markets by showing enough variety to meet diverse customer preferences.
Real example: Large global manufacturers like DeWalt or Milwaukee offer thousands of individual product models. Even online distributors can stock hundreds of SKUs. Displaying more items per search page captures more of this extensive breadth in single placement. Buyers get a fuller picture of available variety without excessive clicking and scrolling—a good range that helps attract customers by demonstrating your comprehensive inventory.
For dropshipping: A dropshipping business with strong supplier relationships can showcase extensive variety without holding inventory, making higher product counts per page a strategic advantage in the market.
More Opportunities to Upsell/Cross-Sell
Merchants have more touchpoints for encouraging buyers to purchase more expensive products (upselling) and offering complementary products (cross-selling) when displaying a comprehensive selection. This directly impacts sales data and revenue potential.
In practice: Showing a contractor eight models of rotary hammers versus two makes it easier to feature premium models with advanced features at higher price points. Similarly, populate accessory suggestions like bits and chisels alongside multiple related tools to boost attachment visibility. Analyzing sales data helps identify which certain products benefit most from increased visibility.
The catch: Too many accessory upsells can distract purchasers focused solely on a primary tool. Test conversion rates by upsell quantity and location to identify ideal balance. More products shown provide the foundation for supplemental sales messages that align with your business goals.
Caters to Different Shopping Styles
Shoppers engage eCommerce sites differently based on their research habits and urgency. Understanding your target market through market research reveals how customers in your specific niche prefer to browse.
Shopper types: “Searchers” have a specific item in mind and use find boxes, filters, and keywords to pinpoint products. “Scrollers” take a discovery-based approach, casually browsing all options within a category. Your business strategy should accommodate both.
Why more products help: For focused searchers, additional products increase the likelihood that a relevant item appears quickly. For engaged scrollers interested in evaluating different product models, seeing 8-10 options per results page facilitates easy discovery over only 2-3. The higher product count makes comparing specs and configurations side-by-side more efficient, improving customer satisfaction and meeting diverse customer preferences.
Drawbacks of Too Many Products
Choice overload for customers
Choice overload or ‘overchoice’ occurs when shoppers encounter too many options. Studies show that too many options can overwhelm and confuse customers. According to one scientific analysis, overchoice makes people feel anxious and emotionally disengaged—directly hurting customer satisfaction.
Real scenario: A construction company manager searches for “cordless drills” and encounters dozens of options with various brands, models, specifications, and price points. Without clear product selection guidance, the experience becomes overwhelming.
The resulting effects:
Decision paralysis: The sheer volume of choices makes it challenging to select the most suitable tools confidently, delaying purchases and reducing sales data performance
Increased cognitive load: Evaluating numerous products requires significant mental effort—comparing technical specifications, reading reviews, considering factors like battery life and durability
Solutions to implement:
Filtering and sorting options: Provide robust filtering so customers narrow choices based on brand, price range, power rating, and customer ratings. Market research should inform which filters your target market values most
Product recommendations: Implement intelligent algorithms that suggest relevant items based on search history and preferences, helping guide product selection
Clear product information: Ensure each listing includes clear, concise information with crucial specifications. Leverage product information management solutions like Catsy PIM software to ensure product data is complete, accurate, and current. Catsy’s readiness reporting feature ensures product details tick all boxes before syndicating to distribution channels like your eCommerce site—essential for maintaining customer satisfaction across your market
Difficulty prominently displaying best sellers.
Displaying many product options challenges your ability to spotlight top-ranked items known to convert well. Best-selling products get drowned within the long tail of slower-moving niche selections. Your sales data shows which items perform best, but customers can’t see this if everything looks equal.
Consequences:
Limited visibility of popular products: Customers miss out on popular, highly-rated items, reducing visibility of products that have gained trust and preference. This wastes opportunities to attract customers with proven performers
Decreased customer confidence: When best-sellers aren’t easily visible, it raises questions about reliability, leading to longer decision-making or customers exploring other platforms. This directly impacts customer satisfaction
Lost cross-selling opportunities: Best sellers are often strategically linked to cross-selling opportunities for accessories or complementary items. Hiding them hurts your business goals and revenue potential
Possible solutions: Create a dedicated best sellers section on the website or homepage, making it easy for customers to find and explore popular products. Use sales data to automatically promote top performers, giving you a competitive advantage in your market.
Pages slower to load with more images and data
The more products displayed per page, the more visual and data elements Shopify servers must process. This causes exponential climb in page load speeds as product quantities increase—directly impacting customer satisfaction and your ability to attract customers.
Example impact: A search results page showing 6-8 SKUs with product images, titles, prices, summaries, and buttons takes 1-2 seconds to load fully. Increase this to 24 products per page, and load times can lag beyond 6-8 seconds. For dropshipping businesses pulling data from multiple sources, this challenge compounds.
Why this happens: Loading multiple megabytes of images, running extensive product metadata calls, and dynamically populating intricate page templates overburdens hosting infrastructure. Each product shown risks doubling visual payload sizes, database queries, and client-side processing. Your marketing budget allocated to site performance becomes critical here.
Mitigation steps: Image optimization should be part of your strategy. Although Shopify does some optimization natively, you may need to reduce file sizes without compromising quality. This is especially important for general stores with diverse product selection across categories.
The efficient solution: If you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs with 5-8 images each, re-sizing for Shopify could take days. Tools like Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions expedite this work quickly and provide ongoing asset management. This is crucial for dropshipping stores managing assets from multiple supplier relationships.
For example: Catsy DAM allows you to optimize images in bulk to fit specific quality standards. Additionally, the tool enriches product photos with metadata and alt-text to enhance Shopify search engine optimization (SEO). Even better, Catsy digital asset management solution is unified with Catsy PIM SaaS, which streamlines mapping product descriptions and product attributes to digital assets—improving fulfillment processes and overall product management.
It is harder to optimize design and layout.
Showcasing more products on search results pages significantly increases layout and styling complexity that you must continuously test and refine. This affects both customer satisfaction and your marketing budget allocation.
The challenge: With only 3-4 power tools occupying a results area, adjusting padding, alignments, image sizes, and visual hierarchy is straightforward. Accommodating 8+ products across varying footprints invites trouble. Understanding how many items your design can effectively handle becomes critical to your business strategy.
Design risks: Overpopulated pages risk unequal white space between products, misaligned titles/prices, inconsistent button placements, and text overlaid across images. Finding the right visual balance, even for experienced designers, is challenging—particularly when trying to maintain consistency across a general store versus a specific niche store.
The impact: Without properly optimized design and layout, pages fail to convey visual authority when equally sharing space across too many products. Customers connect better with targeted curation—not endless overflowing choices. Your market research should reveal which presentation style your target market prefers.
Solution: Explore third-party apps on the Shopify App Store offering additional design and layout customization options for more flexibility in styling and enhanced overall appearance. Factor these tools into your marketing budget as essential investments.
Determining Optimal Products Per Page
When finding the correct number of products per page to display in your Shopify store, understand that no universal ideal number works best across every business model, product category, and customer segment. The question of how many products should an ecommerce site have per page depends entirely on your unique situation.
The approach: Identifying optimal values requires mapping combinations of multiple variables unique to your specific offerings, users, and conversion objectives. While eCommerce UX research confirms showcasing fewer, highly targeted products incentivizes selection confidence, the breadth necessary still varies. There’s no exact number—your business strategy must be informed by market research into your specific niche and target market.
Key questions to guide your approach:
How do your customers tend to shop—more browsing or targeted searching? Market research reveals these patterns
What kind of experience do you want your store to provide? This aligns with your business goals
What goal are you optimizing for—more engagement or conversions? Review your sales data to understand current performance
Are you running a general store, specific niche store, or dropshipping business? Each model has different optimal configurations
What does your marketing budget allow for testing and optimization?
How do your fulfillment processes impact what you can realistically showcase?
Research recommendations:
Use analytics to see click-depth, exit rates, conversion rates—let sales data guide decisions
Implement user testing and eye-tracking studies on mock pages with your target market
Survey customers about their shopping preferences to understand customer preferences directly
Ask for feedback from customer service on what they hear about product selection and navigation
Continue monitoring metrics and making tweaks over time as your market evolves
For dropshipping businesses, consult with suppliers about which certain products convert best
One last optimization: You can enhance the quality of search using faceted filtering and navigation to improve search result precision. This method lets users apply various filters to refine their search results, offering a targeted approach unattainable with generic filters. This helps ensure enough variety without overwhelming choice.
How PIM and DAM help: PIM software categorizes products, which is essential for faceted search. A Shopify PIM enables products to be organized by various product attributes such as size, color, and price. This improves product management across your entire operation. DAM enriches assets with metatags—labels that describe file content. These metatags can be used in faceted searches to help users find specific types of products. See PIM DAM solutions in action for both traditional retail and dropshipping stores.
Key Takeaways
Figuring out the optimal number of products to display on search results pages is a major dilemma facing all e commerce merchants, regardless of size or industry. The question of how many products should an ecommerce site have per page has no universal answer—the ideal balance depends on several intersecting factors specific to your business strategy and market.
Core considerations for custom configurations:
Understanding your products inside-out: Include typical research complexity, specifications details, visuals available, and complementary purchases. This knowledge allows aligning display formats to purchasing workflows using centralized product data from your PIM system. Whether you’re managing certain products in a specific niche or running a diverse general store, product management quality matters.
Getting to know your target audiences: Conduct thorough market research to understand your target market specifically—their intent levels, patience thresholds, and decision-making approaches. Design to their browsing habits and customer preferences—extensive versus focused. Understanding customer preferences gives you an advantage over competitors who take a generic approach.
For large inventories: Adding categorization, filtering, and sorting components gives customers control over large result sets. Effective product data tools prevent choice overload while still showing enough variety to demonstrate your good range. This is crucial whether you’re a traditional retailer or dropshipping business managing multiple supplier relationships.
Monitoring page load performance: Test different products-per-page settings, ensuring additional items don’t exponentially slow interactions and hurt customer satisfaction. More visibility should never mean sluggish stores. Optimize digital assets using DAM platforms. Factor hosting and optimization into your marketing budget.
Testing different page layouts: Determine optimal quantity cut-offs based on keeping engagement high and friction low. Review sales data after each change. Providing flexible display options caters across user needs and helps you achieve business goals more effectively.
Aligning with business strategy: Your product selection approach should support broader business goals. Consider how many items to display based on your fulfillment processes, supplier relationships (for dropshipping stores), and overall capacity to maintain quality customer satisfaction.
Bottom line: Getting the product display right is about finding optimal balance between visual appeal and utility for your specific offerings and customers. There’s no one-size-fits-all universal ideal or exact number—but by conducting market research, analyzing sales data, understanding customer preferences, and considering these elements as a starting point, you can iteratively improve over time. The advantage goes to merchants who test systematically and let data guide their business strategy in their specific market.
Ready to optimize? Start your free trial of Catsy’s PIM Tool and see the magic of PIM and DAM integration for your business—streamlining product information, optimizing digital assets, improving product management, and enhancing performance across all sales channels. Whether you run a dropshipping business, general store, or specific niche operation, Catsy helps you attract customers and maintain supplier relationships with superior product data quality.
There is no universal ideal number. Test configurations from 8-50 products against metrics like page load speeds, click depth, exit rates and conversion rates to find the optimal balance for your business. Start with Shopify’s default of 24.
Grid view enables visual storytelling with product images but fits less products per row. List view prioritizes details over aesthetics and can fit more products with faster page loads. Choose based on your product complexity, shopper intent, mobile usage and visual priorities.
Create a dedicated best sellers section, include badges like “Most Popular” on listings, boost their visibility in search algorithms, and link complementary accessories to upsell from hot items.
Add extensive filtering, sorting and recommendations to streamline search relevancy. Detail key specs upfront and leverage PIMs to centralize accurate product data. Follow category-specific display approaches aligned to research complexity.
Balance visibility with speed using image optimization, CDN for faster loads, reduced page weights through code minification and upgraded hosting plans. Test performance at different products-per-page increments to quantify tradeoffs.
