I used to think the hamburger menu was a given. Three lines in the top corner, and everyone knows to tap it. But once I looked closely at my store’s data, I realized very few customers actually opened it. The problem with the hamburger menu on mobile ecommerce isn’t that it’s ugly or confusing. It’s that it hides the very things customers need to see in order to buy.
This article gathers the four problems I see most clearly, along with a few sourced numbers for you to weigh yourself — not to bash the menu.
Problem 1: it hides too much
A hamburger is, at its core, a closed box. Customers don’t know what’s inside until they open it. And most of them don’t open it.
Nielsen Norman Group (NN/G) once ran a study with 179 users across 6 websites, on both phones and desktop. The notable conclusion: hiding navigation cuts discoverability nearly in half. When the menu is hidden, people use it less, and when they do use it, they get to it later.
Put that in the context of a merchant: say you have a “New arrivals” or “50% off” category you really want customers to see. But if it sits inside the hamburger, most customers scroll past your homepage and leave without ever knowing the promotion exists. You put in the work entering the data and adding the images, but it sits behind a closed door.
Problem 2: it adds an extra step
The hamburger forces customers through more steps than necessary: open the menu, wait for it to slide out, read the list, find the right category, tap, and only then reach the page.
Compare that with a Tab Bar — a fixed navigation strip at the bottom of the screen. Customers see “Home,” “Categories,” “Cart,” and “Account” right away and tap straight to what they need. One tap instead of three or four.
Every extra step is a place where a customer can change their mind or lose patience. On mobile, patience is already thin. NN/G also recorded that users worked 15% slower on sites with hidden navigation on mobile, and up to 39% slower on desktop, compared to visible navigation. Slower not because customers are slow, but because the structure forces them to hunt.
This indirectly relates to cart abandonment. According to the Baymard Institute, the average ecommerce cart abandonment rate is around 70%, and on mobile it’s even a touch higher. I’m not saying the hamburger is the main cause — the biggest causes are still surprise extra costs, forced account creation, and a clunky checkout. But every small bit of friction in the journey adds up, and hard-to-use navigation is one of them.
Problem 3: a position that’s awkward for the thumb
This is the point most easily overlooked. The hamburger almost always sits in a top corner, left or right. And the top corner is the hardest area to reach when holding a phone in one hand.
Steven Hoober’s research shows that about half of users hold their phone in one hand and operate it mainly with the thumb. The “thumb zone” map divides the screen into three areas: an easy-to-reach zone in the lower middle, a stretch zone on the sides, and a hard-or-nearly-unreachable zone in the top corners.
The bigger the phone, the more this hard zone expands. Putting your main navigation button in the top corner means forcing customers to change their grip or use a second hand just to open the menu. It’s a small physical barrier, but a real one.
By contrast, the Tab Bar and the FAB (floating action button) sit in the lower half of the screen — right where the thumb naturally rests. Customers don’t have to stretch. That’s a solid reason to consider moving navigation downward.
Problem 4: out of sight, out of mind
Mobile customers act on what’s in front of them. They don’t keep in their head that “this store probably has an abc section somewhere.” Whatever appears, they tap; whatever’s hidden, they forget.
A hidden menu is a little-used menu. It isn’t wrong technically, but it inadvertently demotes your most important paths down to the level of “nothing there.” If your best-selling category sits behind three lines, behaviorally it’s nearly invisible.
This is also why many stores pull a few core categories out into the open, visible right on the screen, and keep only the less important things (Contact, Policies, FAQ) in the hidden menu. Show customers what you need to sell. What’s there for reference can stay hidden.
So should you drop the hamburger entirely?
Not quite. The hamburger is still useful for secondary categories, and customers’ familiarity with the icon is real. The problem isn’t the icon itself, but cramming all your important navigation into it.
The approach I find reasonable is to combine them: use a Tab Bar at the bottom for 4–5 core paths, paired with a Slide/Hamburger Menu for the rest. Customers get a shortcut to what they need often, while you still have a tidy place to hold the less-used items.
This is exactly the problem Navi+ was built to solve: a no-code, AI-powered menu builder for Shopify and any website — it can create a Tab Bar, Mega Menu, Slide/Hamburger Menu, FAB, and Grid Menu. You configure mobile and desktop separately, so you can run a Tab Bar on mobile while keeping a Mega Menu on desktop. The menu stays put when you change themes, and it’s optimized so it doesn’t slow your pages down.
Speed isn’t a minor thing. Google judges experience through Core Web Vitals, with the “good” thresholds being LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1. A heavy, carelessly built navigation bar can push these metrics in the wrong direction. When you choose how to build your menu, factor in speed from the start, not as an afterthought.
In short
These four problems aren’t meant to convict the hamburger menu, but to help you see clearly the cost of hiding navigation:
- Hides too much — customers don’t know what’s inside.
- Adds extra steps — more taps than needed to reach a category.
- Awkward position — the top corner is outside the thumb zone.
- Out of sight — what customers can’t see, they don’t use.
Every merchant wants customers to find products fast and buy easily. If your navigation is getting in the way of both, it’s worth a second look. You don’t need to overhaul your whole store right away; just try moving a few best-selling categories to where customers can see them, and measure again — you’ll already notice a difference.
This article is part of the larger guide on Mobile navigation — why the hamburger menu is getting outdated and what to use instead.