I was asked an interesting but seemingly straightforward eCommerce question by my friend Joe Apfelbaum the other day - if I have 8 variants (size/color) on a page, should I put it on one page or 8 pages of my site

A simple SEO theory of eCommerce means that you might want to separate them, but that is likely not the most consumer-friendly thing to do.

First, the beauty of eCommerce is you can test everything. eCommerce is math, people! Test your conversion rate and sell-through. There is no one answer, but here are some of the questions I would think about:

• Are there any price differences between the variants? It's sometimes difficult for consumers to realize that changing the size or color of something updates the price on the page.

• Are there any feature differences between the variants? At times, certain colors have exclusive features that are difficult to market if they are on a page with 7 others.

• Are there any fit considerations for the variants? It's easier for the consumer to compare on one page versus multiple.

• Are there any potential inventory issues with some variants that would make it difficult to comparison shop if one were out, and can you make it easier to choose another variant?

Sometimes you can "split the baby" by putting different colors on their own pages, and put the size variants on the page with them, rather than putting all colors and variants on one page. It needs to be easy to shop. Brent Horton had a delightful (and hilarious) response to this, really sharing the exhaustion a customer feels. I’m including it here:

I experienced this the other day while shopping on a company’s site that was fairly new to me. On the “men’s shirts” landing page, there were several different polo style shirts that appeared to be the same shirt but different colors. Not being as familiar with that brand, I wasn’t sure if the shirts were the same, just different color? Or if they were similar looking shirts but different material and also different color. Took me a few clicks to figure it out, and turns out they were the same shirts, just different color, which annoyed me and made my first experience on that website not completely satisfying. My vote is the standard should be one color is displayed on the initial landing page for the category, then different colors and sizes are displayed once you click through. Even better, on the landing page, below each of the shirts, have little tiny dots showing the different colors available, so it is obvious to the novice visitor to that page that they are only showing one color per shirt, but there are different colors available. After typing all of that, I am now slightly embarrassed that I am annoyed by something so insignificant.

Relatable? Absolutely. Brent is reminding us to think of the customer here. It's amazing how many people never use the word “customer” once in their conversations about eCommerce.

Brandt Heisey reiterates this point, and reminds us to re-center our priorities: “If a site makes me go to 8 pages to see all the variants I won't buy there. It's crazy consumer unfriendly and doesn't represent how shopping works in the this day and age. Separating them tell me you don't care about my experience as a shopper, just the experience of search engines.”

Sri Rajagopalan gave a helpful visualization: “Let's think of the store shelf (yes I said it). One would never* display 8 variants in different aisles. They would be clustered together in one aisle. Why? The consumer's browsing and choice set and finding the solution becomes much more friendly. Online is the same - one SKU, 8 variants, one PDP [product display page].”

*I added the asterisk, because Sarah Kwan pointed out, in response to Sri’s use of the word “never,” that many specialty retailers indeed separate variants throughout the store. She added “Some other consumers enjoy browsing and 'the hunt' as part of teheir store experience, and the retailers who separate variants may be catering more to them - or they may separate variants so they can merchandise by color scheme (and potentially increase basket size of people who are looking for a certain palette). People often want to shop by criteria that doesn't apply across all variants of an item (size, color..)”

There are certainly arguments for breaking up multiple variants into individual PDPs. Have you done any A/B testing on this? There seem to be multiple (strongly held!) opinions on what’s “best practice” here. What do you think?