But this makes your entire article nonsense, do you not get that?
People could have been clicking through more because one was better at conveying information than the other, so they didn't need to click through to make a purchasing decision. Maybe the list meant that they ignored the text?
What if the end result is you still only sold 20 boxes of tea for each? Your assumption would then be wrong, the grid would be better because it's serving less page views.
What if because the consumer had to click around more you actually had less sales? They took too long to find what they wanted?
You're sort of touching on two of the important metrics; product views per session, and page views per product view. You want to maximize the former, and minimize the latter. Why would you want to maximize the former? Stickiness. Your customer will be more likely to stay around and purchase, whether it's now, or later, if they see a lot of different products-- even if they aren't finding what they're looking for (which, btw, is impossible to divine from this metric).
"What if because the consumer had to click around more you actually had less sales?"
That's very difficult to measure-- you can't assume that a customer at the browse portion of the funnel is able to find what they're looking for or not, just by looking at the number. You might want to look at the number of add-to-cart actions per product view for a better answer to that question.
People could have been clicking through more because one was better at conveying information than the other, so they didn't need to click through to make a purchasing decision. Maybe the list meant that they ignored the text?
What if the end result is you still only sold 20 boxes of tea for each? Your assumption would then be wrong, the grid would be better because it's serving less page views.
What if because the consumer had to click around more you actually had less sales? They took too long to find what they wanted?