When we talk about user behavior on a store, there’s a truth that can deflate any shop owner: most of the effort you pour into product descriptions, banners, and carefully chosen wording… shoppers barely read it. They scan. They run their eyes across the page quickly to find what they need, and if they don’t spot it in the first few seconds, they leave.
This article gathers what I’ve observed while running a store, checked against a few studies so it isn’t just gut feeling. The goal is simple: understand what shoppers actually do on a page, so you can arrange navigation the right way.
Shoppers don’t read, they scan
Nielsen Norman Group, a team that specializes in user experience research, has an almost classic line: “people don’t read online — they scan.” They’ve tracked eye movement over many years and seen this pattern repeat.
That means a shopper coming to your store doesn’t read top to bottom in order. They sweep their eyes across the page, catch a few keywords, a few images, then guess for themselves: “is there something I need here?”
The window for deciding is short too. According to Nielsen Norman, the first 10 seconds of a visit are when shoppers are most likely to leave. Get past that mark and they tend to stay longer — but those first 10 seconds are brutal.
The takeaway for sellers: the most important thing has to appear right away, without making shoppers scroll or think. For a store, the most important thing is usually navigation — categories, the menu bar, the search box. That’s what shoppers need to know “what’s sold here and where I go next.”
F-pattern, Z-pattern: where shoppers’ eyes go first
When scanning a page, a shopper’s eyes don’t move at random. They follow a few fairly steady paths.
The most common is the F-pattern. Eye-tracking research from Nielsen Norman Group describes it as the letter F: shoppers skim one horizontal line at the top, drop down a bit to skim a second horizontal line (shorter), then scan vertically down the left edge. The top section and the left edge are where eyes pause most.
On text-heavy pages — blog posts, long product descriptions — the F-pattern shows up often. The lesson: put important information at the start of the line, the start of the paragraph, and don’t bury it at the end of a long sentence.
The Z-pattern tends to appear on lean, low-text pages, like a landing page or a simple homepage: the eye moves from the top-left corner across to the right, then diagonally down to the bottom left, then across to the right again. The shape of a Z.
What both share: the top and the left edge get priority. This is why the main menu, logo, and major categories have traditionally sat at the top. Not because the convention looks nice, but because that’s genuinely where shoppers’ eyes go first. If you tuck an important category into a hidden corner on the right or way down at the bottom of the page, there’s a good chance shoppers won’t see it.
Mobile and desktop: two very different ways of using a site
Many stores are designed on a computer screen and then assume “mobile is probably the same.” In reality the two contexts are very different.
On desktop, shoppers have a mouse, a wide screen, and can see the whole picture. They hover freely, open multi-column mega menus, compare several items at once, and are usually a bit more patient.
On mobile it’s the opposite: small screen, often held in one hand, mostly operated with the thumb. In an observation by Steven Hoober of more than 1,300 phone users, about half held the device in one hand. That gave rise to the idea of the “thumb zone” — the area in the middle and bottom of the screen is easiest to reach, while the two top corners are very hard to get to.
This is why a navigation bar placed at the bottom of the screen (like a Tab Bar) is usually easier to tap than a menu stuffed up at the top — the thumb rests right there. Shoppers are also less patient on mobile: partly because the small screen is harder to work with, and partly because they’re often on the move or waiting on someone, and easily abandon things midway.
The difference between mobile and desktop leads to a practical conclusion: navigation should be configured separately for each kind of screen, not share a single design. On desktop it might be a Mega Menu spread across several columns; on mobile it’s better to use a Tab Bar at the bottom plus a tidy slide-out menu. This is also what Navi+ (naviplus.io) is built for — letting you configure mobile and desktop menus separately, drag-and-drop with no code, so each screen has navigation that fits how shoppers’ hands actually work.
| Desktop | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|
| Interaction | Mouse, sees the whole picture | Thumb, thumb zone |
| Screen | Wide, multiple columns | Narrow, vertical scroll |
| Patience | Higher | Lower, easily abandons |
| Sensible menu | Mega Menu | Tab Bar + Slide Menu |
Where shoppers drop off most
When you watch a store, there are a few spots where shoppers tend to stumble and leave. Most of them aren’t product problems, they’re navigation problems.
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Can’t find the category. The shopper knows what they want but can’t see the way in. The category is hidden, named confusingly, or sits outside the eye’s scanning path. They guess a few times, come up empty, and leave.
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Too many menu levels. They click an item, a submenu appears, then another submenu. Each layer is one more decision the shopper has to make, and each one is a chance for them to give up. On mobile it’s even worse because the screen is small.
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Not knowing where they are. The shopper gets lost in the store, unsure which section they’re in or how to get back to the previous page. That feeling of disorientation makes them close the tab to be done with it.
Fully hidden menus in particular — the hamburger style that tucks all navigation behind one icon — are also worth thinking about. Nielsen Norman Group ran tests and found that hidden navigation is discovered far less than navigation that’s clearly visible, so shoppers use it less and take more time to finish their task. The hamburger does save space, but whatever you hide, shoppers use less. A few important items should be left on display, for example through a Tab Bar that’s always visible at the bottom.
These drop-off points quietly feed into a number every seller knows: according to the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate has hovered around 70% for over a decade. Not every abandoned cart is due to navigation, but the shoppers who leave right at the category page because they got lost — before they ever reach the cart — are clearly part navigation’s doing.
And then there’s page speed
One thing that’s easy to forget: no matter how fast a shopper scans, they still have to wait for the page to appear first. If the menu janks, jumps, or makes the page heavier, the experience is ruined from the very first second.
Google has a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals to measure this, with “good” thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds (main content appears), INP under 200 milliseconds (the page responds to a tap), CLS under 0.1 (the layout doesn’t shift around). A menu bar that makes the page jump or slow down does more harm than good. So when choosing a tool to build your menu, favor a lightweight one that won’t drag these metrics down.
In short: shoppers on a store scan rather than read, their eyes follow a few fairly predictable paths, and they use mobile very differently from desktop. Once you understand those things, arranging menus, categories, and navigation becomes much clearer — less guesswork, and more in line with how shoppers’ hands and eyes actually work.
This article is part of the larger guide on Why shoppers visit your store but don’t buy — and how navigation plays a part.