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I found research about dropping the vertical menu and use a horizontal instead

Dropping the vertical menu had a positive effect products on my site as the specific product became the focus of the page.

The problem is with scrolling - if a customer goes to the bottom of the page and wishes to switch the category he has to scroll up and select an element of the menu.

I am thinking of solving this issue by converting my top menu (that has all the categories, contact info and other cms pages) into a sticky menu that is always shown.

My other option is to add a javascript button that is diplayed when the customer scrolls down and links to the top of the page.

Do you know of research that points out that a horizontal sticky menu is bad UX that damages conversion rate?

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The only case I know of that can be made against sticky, horizontal navigation bars is the fact it hides some of the content.
Some people are used to scrolling with their spacebar. They read everything on screen and hit spacebar which moves the screen just below the fold. The first few lines of content will be behind the navigation bar forcing the user to scroll up a little.

Getting in the mindset of the user, what is the reason they want to change the category and what is the result?
They are done with this category list and want to navigate further or they realized they're in the wrong category list. Clicking an other category navigates them to an entirely different page.

In that case a means of scrolling up fast could be enough.

There is however a third solution. A sticky navigation bar that appears when you scroll up. An example is the jquery plugin Headroom. With this plugin your navigation bar will be just outside of view and when scrolling up, no matter how far you scrolled down, the header will appear with just a minimum amount of scrolling.

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    Headroom does similar to what Safari does on iOS with a small distinction. Headroom does not check the acceleration of scrolling while Safari does. It's subtle but better.
    – maulik13
    Mar 17, 2014 at 10:42
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    I good solution, never thought about that even thought Chrome does this on Android with it's url bar. I will first add a sticky menu and later try it with Headroom.
    – Marek Andreánsky
    Mar 17, 2014 at 12:34

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