Is it a good idea to implement infinite scroll on a list of products?

I like Infinite scroll as a feature but it doesn't fits everywhere. For sure I won't be recommending Infinite scroll for e-commerce stores even if its looks cheesy. I have put down few points why it might not be a good idea for your online store 1)     With Infinite scrolling you are missing on the footer links. Remember as online store footer links are very important and should be reachable. 2)     Whenever user scroll loading (Ajax calls) automatically starts giving user no control over it. User can’t do anything to stop that #annoying 3)     Let user decide if he/she wants to view more products or not. Don’t confuse him with lots of products at once. Let users feel the control is in their hands & you are not a desperate salesman throwing products after products to user. 4)     User will feel lost after 4-5 scrolls, not sure what to do next or how to go back. Remember user is on your store to buy something not navigate picture gallery. 5)     Finding something again is more difficult with endless scrolling. Just imagine if you want to buy a product which was somewhere at the end of the listing, you need to keep scrolling and wait for all the products to load #frustrating 6)      Pro-grammatically the DOM starts becoming heavy, frequent Ajax calls & performance degrades with each scroll. Low end mobile will die handling all this. 7)     Most of the time user won’t release that they are in infinite scroll mode. Let them know, best would be to let user choose between ‘infinite scroll’ or ‘pagination’ or ‘view more’. Feel free to add your points. Counter comments are welcome, I know it is up and open for discussion and argue.

Infinite scrolling is being used by most up and coming commerce sites mainly due to the fact that user behavior has moved from shopping on your computer to shopping on your devices especially mobile phones. On a mobile device infinite scroll provides a much better user experience than pagination. If you are thinking of creating a product catalogue its important to think of how users are going to interact with it down the road which would be mainly mobile.

From UX perspective, a disadvantage of infinite scroll is the annoying misses to click on page footer links ..hence a "view more" button is preferable to get a scrolled view instead of paginated. That said, what would still be missing is an insight into how much more can be viewed - which pagination addresses. So IMO, if we can bring that insight in the scroll view like.. "View 10/<n> more" .. where <n> could be a number or something pretty like "hundreds more". Another point that needs to be considered is how heavy a browser will get if you bring in infinite scroll instead of pagination, esp since in your case, you may have images for every item.

Infinite scroll is good for casual listings like image albums but not good enough for product listing.

I think that it is a bad idea to implement infinite scroll on a list of products. The shoppers may not like to scroll infinitely searching for a product. Pages with infinite scroll will also take more time to load which may lead to shoppers abandoning the page. Using paging is a better idea as then the shopper is then aware of the total number of results and it will be easier for him to remember the product location based on the page number. This will make it easier for them to come back and look for the product later.

No, Its never a good idea to use infinite scrolling into any e-commerce site. Infinite scrolling promises for better UX  but somehow it is giving pain to users also. See here : http://www.rswebsols.com/tutorials/ecommerce-tutorials/infinite-scrolling-kill-ecommerce