Quickview should be turned off on your store

Increasing in popularity over the last few years is the Quick View feature. Could this be doing more harm than good on your Shopify store?

As the name suggest, Quick View allows users to take a quick peek at a product. This is done by opening a lightbox overlay, or as many might call it, a popup.

Benefits are said to include improved user shopping. Likely because they don’t have to load a new page or go back and forth between the collection and the product page.

When a customer clicks on the Quick View, more details appear such as more product details and larger/more images which could be helpful.

Yet, I still don’t recommend using Quick View.

The risk of using Quick View is that some customers misinterpret the Quick View popup as the product page itself.

In this example from a Shopify store using the Fashionopolism theme, we see a similarly sized product image, title, price, quantity, an add to cart button, and in the bottom right corner, text that says View Full Details.

In this instance, the Quick View fails to add any value to the customer. There is no product description shown to answer any questions or provide further clarity on the product.

The link to View Full Details, tucked away in the bottom right corner, is hard to tell it’s a link. If anything, in this example, we’re adding more clicks for the customer.

Taking a look at another example from All Girls Shave Club who uses the Turbo theme, we can see some improvements, but still not great.

Quick View is in the center of the photo instead of at the bottom or underneath the image. Potentially causing a user to accidentally click Quick View when intending to see the full product page. Leading them to believe the popup is the full product page, when it’s not.

The link to View Full Details is prominently displayed and its still possible a customer doesn’t click on the link for full details. The product description is cutoff, and although the image is bigger, the eye is drawn to the call to action which is Add to Cart.

Research shows that turning on features for Quick View do increase conversions. Yet leading user experience experts say that they too don’t recommend Quick View in most cases.

Many customers who click on the Quick View, do so because they are looking for more information. They could be looking for a larger product image, more product images, description details and perhaps if there are other colors or variants that are available.

Although I rarely recommend Quick View, if it’s a feature you want to use, it’s best to test the feature on your site. Check to see how much Quick View impacts the site speed and choose a theme that pulls important information into the popup.

Before deciding if Quick View is right for a store during the Website Rescues, I look at other ways we can optimize the collection view. For example, showing color variants or a secondary hover image. It’s also important to test Quick View on mobile to make sure the experience isn’t cumbersome on a smaller screen.