I don't know about you, but when I actually get to the point of about to pull the trigger on a product, I have it narrowed down 3 or 4 options. Most filters are terrible so I actually have the options open in different tabs and could not care less how many options are on each page.
Sometimes I want to be able to sift through numerous options when what I'm looking for doesn't have to be a terribly specific thing. Or maybe I don't know what the retailer calls the thing I'm looking for, so I want to quickly scan over a lot of images to find the thing. Or sometimes their descriptions are just crap, so searching is not going to be too useful to begin with. Or the filters are indeed terrible, so once it is "narrowed down" I'm still left with 140 choices.
My guess is that these options come from analyzing traffic data, and that anecdotal ATOT posts are not tallied much.
Bleh, mainstream data. I'm the sort who can do a lot with keyboard shortcuts. Quite a lot of people don't know that keyboard shortcuts exist. They do most of their interaction using the mouse. So I'm also perhaps not the sort who'd be used in a usability study for mainstream software design. Most of the design choices in modern software tend to hit me like a whack in the knees. So slow. No more keyboard shortcuts. More mousing. Ugh.
Likewise, yuck to website design choices like that. (It's also possible that they just haven't updated their site in a
really long time. Some managers or business owners seem to think that putting up a website is a once-and-done expense.)
But maybe there is some studying behind it. I'd love to know why Amazon doesn't even give the
choice of changing the number of products per page.
Though their website has gotten damn sluggish in the last few years, so more crap loading would probably bog down a 3.2GHz i7.