The items that appear at the top of your product list page are the ones most visible to your customers - and as a result, the most likely to be purchased. In SuiteCommerce, this visibility is controlled through sorting. But what’s the best way to sort your items? That depends entirely on what products you want your shoppers to notice first. Want more power to control sorting on your product listing pages? Take a look at Advanced Compound Sorting in SuiteCommerce.
Highlighting a product can take many other forms, too - banners, pop-ups, or even custom content sections like a "Frequently Bought Together" box. As with your site navigation, the key is striking a balance. Using none of these tools is the retail equivalent of staying silent while your customer browses. Overdo it, and your site becomes noise - shouting at the customer rather than starting a conversation.
PLP Display Options
SuiteCommerce offers a few different display modes for your product list page: grid view, list view, and custom views, depending on your specific audience. For example, if you're targeting wholesalers, a spreadsheet-style layout might work better - making it easier and faster to add products to a cart. The aim is to reduce friction, not add cognitive load.
At its core, SuiteCommerce is flexible and dynamic - but there is a limitation to keep in mind: out of the box, the PLP only shows product image, name, and price. If you want more data to appear, like SKU numbers or short descriptions, that requires a custom extension.
Item Images
You’re working with limited space on the product list page. That makes image quality incredibly important. But it’s not just about resolution - consider how each product is framed and placed, too. Here’s an example: the Gates n Fences PLP shows decent-quality images, but they’re so tightly packed together that it’s hard to visually scan or browse them. Contrast that with the Rent the Runway PLP, which features well-spaced images, easy-to-use filters, and clear visual contrast between product image and background.
A simple way to evaluate your PLP's visual clarity is to time how long it takes you to count the items shown. Another method? Try looking at the PLP while doing basic math in your head - then do the same with another site’s PLP. When your brain slows down and struggles to multitask on one but not the other, that means the layout is demanding too much mental effort. Poor processing = poor engagement.
The deeper concept here is cognitive overload. David JP Phillips, well-known for his insights on presentation design, explores the risks of overloading your audience’s brain - especially in his TEDx Talk, “How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint.” Much of what he shares about slide design also applies to e-commerce user experience.
The takeaway: an overly busy PLP makes visitors tune out. Aim for layouts that are mentally easy to process. That usually means spreading products across multiple, smaller pages instead of cramming everything onto a single screen. And that’s perfectly fine - these category-specific PLPs will be thoughtfully designed and easily accessible, especially when paired with intuitive navigation.
SuiteCommerce Navigation Tools: The Search Bar
For many customers, the search bar is the fastest way to find what they’re looking for. Not everyone has the patience to browse through your site's menu or hierarchy - instead, they’ll jump straight to the search bar with a keyword in mind.
Setting up the SuiteCommerce search experience takes place under Setup > SuiteCommerce Advanced > Set Up Website. Within that setup area, go to the Search Index subtab to control the indexing and search behavior. You can configure field priorities and define how each one matches search queries.
When a user types into the search bar, they’re actually querying data from your NetSuite item records - at least the ones marked to appear in your webstore. This is a significant benefit of running a unified platform like NetSuite: search results reflect live item records, and you don’t need to manually sync or re-upload data for web traffic.
Let’s say you sell dental supplies. In NetSuite, you could create a custom field on toothbrush items to identify whether they’re designed for children. That custom field can then be included in your webstore search, giving customers more relevant and accurate results - without any extra maintenance on your part.
Let’s say you’ve configured your product search to recognize a specific field - like “children’s” - as searchable criteria. Now, a customer types “children’s” into the search bar, and they instantly see every product tagged for kids. You’ve just replicated the kind of product recommendation a store associate would offer in a physical shop when asked for a suitable toothbrush for a toddler - assuming that associate had perfect product knowledge.
Want to explore more about how facets, search, and sorting shape the product list page (PLP)? Here’s a helpful diagram from the SuiteCommerce developer resources:
SuiteCommerce Navigation Tools: Menu Bar and Item Categories
NetSuite lets you organize your product catalog using commerce categories. These are defined groupings of products that you arrange on the backend. You can also add subcategories and even sub-subcategories, which is especially useful for businesses with layered product types. All categories within a website fall under one catalog - a collection of commerce categories.
If you manage multiple ecommerce sites, perhaps one for B2B sales and another for B2C, or if you're selling a mix of different products across industries, having multiple catalogs in NetSuite can simplify backend management.
On the frontend, you can structure your site navigation so that every category - and subcategory - links to its own dedicated PLP. Just make sure the nav structure remains user-friendly and not too complex.
Here’s how this layout might look:
Imagine “Lighting” is a top-level category. Beneath it are four second-level categories like Ceiling, Floor, Table, and Outdoor lighting. Each of these might contain a group of third-level categories. Hovering over “Lighting” reveals the dropdown menu. Clicking on it takes users to a broader category overview page - a PLP-of-PLPs - where the four level-two groups are listed.
These individual category PLPs act just like mini landing pages. That means all best practices you apply to your homepage - hero images, carousels, or embedded videos - apply here too. Investing in strong visuals is worth the return.
Just look at how Subway structures category-specific PLPs with vibrant, eye-catching images:
Sandwiches
Salads
Each PLP group maintains visual consistency. Within a PLP, every item is similarly framed and presented. Between PLPs, there are subtle design differences that still feel cohesive.
Here’s another navigation strategy worth considering:
If your customers typically purchase across multiple categories during one visit, you might want to consolidate your navigation. Instead of linking each navigation tab to a different PLP entirely, link all to a centralized PLP but pre-set different filter parameters depending on the tab selected.
Up to this point, we’ve focused on navigating forward - guiding a customer step-by-step through your site toward checkout. But forward isn’t always the direction shoppers want to go. Sometimes they need to retrace their steps - maybe they clicked on the wrong item or want to compare different products.
Versich ensures that SuiteCommerce supports this kind of backward navigation with breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs show a clear visual path of where the customer is on your site. Think of it as Hansel and Gretel’s trail - only it works. Each step in the breadcrumb trail is clickable, allowing users to jump back to any earlier point in their browsing.
Breadcrumbs are especially useful when good SEO brings someone straight to a PDP or a PLP as their first interaction with your site. With breadcrumbs, these visitors can quickly make sense of where they are and jump deeper - or backtrack - through your funnel with ease.
Add to Cart Options on the PLP
Your product list page doesn’t just serve a browsing function - it’s a conversion tool. Optimizing the PLP for conversions is key to increasing sales. SuiteCommerce provides two main tactics for helping customers add items to their cart directly from this page:
1. Add to Cart buttons placed visibly within each item block.
2. Quick-Add functionality, which lets shoppers view fast product details and add items to their cart - without leaving the PLP for a full product page.
You can choose to hide the Add to Cart button on matrix items that require option selections, while keeping it visible for all other non-matrix items. Meanwhile, the Quick Add feature is effective for both standard and matrix items. Although some shoppers might want to place an item in their cart directly from a Product List Page (PLP), the majority typically won’t. In most situations, their next step is to click through from the PLP to the Product Display Page (PDP) of a specific item.
That means your PDP needs to be sleek, engaging, and packed with the right information to encourage customers to add items to their cart and move forward in the buying process.
If you're ready, let's dive into crafting the perfect PDP in SuiteCommerce.
That’s everything for now - we hope this guide sparked some helpful ideas! If you have questions about SuiteCommerce PLPs or want expert guidance on enhancing your own product list pages, the Versich team is here to help anytime. We're a certified Oracle NetSuite Commerce Partner with the expertise to tackle SuiteCommerce projects of any scale.
Versich is a top-tier SuiteCommerce agency focused on developing high-performing customer portals. Unlike others, we’ve already engineered practical solutions to common challenges.
