Empower Your E-Commerce UX and Decisions with 78,000+ Hours of UX Research
With Baymard Premium you’ll get full access to 78,000+ hours of UX research findings, all distilled into 600+ design guidelines and 145,000+ UX performance scores — insights already used by most of the world’s leading e-commerce sites.
Use Baymard’s comprehensive e-commerce UX research to create “State of the Art” e-commerce experiences, discover which design patterns consistently cause usability issues for users, and see how your UX performance stacks up against leading sites.
Continually Updated Research That Helps Your Organization
- Speed up and validate design decisions by bringing large-scale UX test insights into all of your decision-making.
- Consistently develop high-performing e-commerce designs that perform well with end users.
- See the gap between your performance and leading e-commerce sites, and learn what it will take to create an interface that outperforms them.
- Avoid going down the wrong path early in the design and development process.
- Get inspiration from leading and competing e-commerce sites that have excellent UX performance, and learn why they perform well.
- Augment your UX design decisions towards the rest of your organization with external unbiased research.
“This was indeed very helpful guidance and a very well-documented roadmap for us to fix, validate, organize, collectively understand and continually improve our ecommerce foundation.”
What You’ll Get With Baymard Premium
We’ve distilled our 78,000+ hours of usability testing and UX research into 600+ guidelines.
Each of the 600+ guidelines focuses on a specific aspect, feature, or design pattern of the user experience and documents what consistently causes issues for users and what consistently performs well.
Each guideline offers in-depth test insights on how users behave and interpret a given UI/feature, and provides your team with concrete and actionable advice on how to implement the designs and features that are consistently observed to perform the best with users.
The research is structured into 90+ topics, each containing 5-15 guidelines, that cover every aspect of your online user experience. This supports both when your organization needs to make a complete site redesign, or when you need documentation on how to best design and implement a specific page, a UI component, or feature.
Unrestricted access to our UX benchmark database provides your team with systematic inspiration from 123 leading and competing e-commerce sites, showcasing what performs well with users and what doesn’t – all through real-world examples.
Each of the 123 case studies (US and European sites) provides you with:
- a complete UX performance drill-down across most of the 600+ guidelines — revealing the sites’ UX strengths and weaknesses,
- a full annotated walkthrough of the sites’ desktop and mobile user experience, with 300-400 positive and negative UX highlights for each site, illustrating both best- and worst-practice implementations.
The case studies are useful in showing what website elements and designs from leading and competing brands that your organization should, and, more importantly, shouldn’t draw inspiration from.
We continually add new UX research to Baymard Premium — roughly 20,000+ hours per year. This keeps your organization on top of the current design trends, the latest UX research findings, general changes in user behavior, and the current state of the competitive landscape.
We deprecate any guidelines and recommendations if the underlying user behavior or UX issue is no longer observed in large-scale testing.
Unrestricted access to the UX performance benchmark provides you and your team with a comprehensive overview of the current competitive e-commerce UX landscape, identifying industry leaders and common UX pitfalls to stay clear of.
Your team can drill down into detailed UX performance scorecards for today’s largest sites, with 145,000+ weighted UX performance scores and visual explanations of how they perform and stack up.
Self-assess your own site UX to produce a detailed UX performance scorecard, enabling you to see how your site stacks up against the industry, the competition, and ‘state of the art’ user experiences.
The Review Tool builds upon our audit team’s 9 years of experience conducting highly detailed UX audits, and has more than 7,000 site implementation scenarios available as an interactive questionnaire, allowing you and your team to conduct accurate and repeatable UX performance evaluations. The tool also guides you on how to address your site’s UX shortcomings.
You can also assess your prototypes or designs-in-progress to gauge how your individual design changes are improving the overall user experience.
Your team can create an unlimited number of self-assessments in the Review Tool.
92,000+ best- and worst-practice implementation examples, across different industries, illustrate how you can implement each of the 600+ UX guidelines.
The examples are all searchable and performance-verified, and are continuously updated to provide you the latest examples from leading brands and sites.
This allows you to quickly cherry-pick the most relevant inspiration from leading brands and competitors, to use, for example, in meetings with internal stakeholders or clients
Full access to the Page Design tool provides you and your team with 9,200+ full-page design examples, annotated with 92,000+ UX callouts by our UX research team.
This allows your team to systematically gather inspiration for a particular “page type” you are working on — e.g., “no results” pages, product pages, “shipping method” steps, top-level navigation, mobile filtering interfaces, etc.
The Page Design tool also highlights the UX pitfalls you should avoid for each of the 52 page types available.
Depending on your Baymard Premium plan, your team gets between 1 and 6 live 30-minute sessions per year with a Baymard senior UX researcher.
You and your team can use these sessions to get quick and informal external input from a senior Baymard UX researcher on any of your current projects or internal discussions. For example, use a session to get live feedback on existing designs or new prototypes for a specific website component, discuss ideas and challenges specific to your site and organization, etc.
(All calls are confidential and bookable online with 2-3 days notice. If you instead need a complete site audit, see our full-site UX audit service)
When you sign up, Baymard staff will show you and your team around Baymard Premium in a private live onboarding call.
This onboarding call will ensure that your team hits the ground running, can ask questions, and can easily find the research that best matches the areas of most interest to you.
(All plans except the Personal plan qualify for an onboarding call.)
All team members can take a series of exams and become “Certified E-Commerce UX Professionals by Baymard Institute”, ensuring a consistently high level of knowledge in your organization, and documenting your UX expertise externally with (optional) inclusion in Baymard’s public list of certified UX professionals.
(The certification program is only available on the Medium or Large plans).
Beyond the research catalog itself, Baymard Premium also provides you and your team with 51 keynote presentations, available on-demand, of the most common UX and design pitfalls within one of 90+ research topics.
These training module videos are good for those who want broad coverage of the UX research highlights, and for those who prefer a training-based presentation format.
A new training module is added every 4th week and ends with a live Q&A session.
“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”
Research-Based Findings That Uncover Real User Behavior and UX Pitfalls
Baymard’s research findings are based on 78,000+ hours of testing e-commerce sites. Specifically, they’re based on 2,700+ qualitative moderated in-lab usability test sessions following the “Think Aloud” protocol — real users testing live e-commerce sites — combined with in-lab eye-tracking testing and quantitative studies with 14,453 users.
During testing the desktop and mobile websites from more than 90 leading US and European brands, the test subjects encountered 20,500+ usability issues.
The insight from analyzing these issues has been distilled into 600+ user experience guidelines prioritized by UX impact — providing you with concise design guidelines that will help you improve your site’s UX performance and conversion rate.
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
How Does Your UX Performance Stack Up to Apple, Walmart, or Zalando?
Using data and insights from usability test findings, Baymard has benchmarked the online shopping experience of 123 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites across all of the 600+ UX guidelines.
This provides your organization with the most comprehensive e-commerce UX database in the world with 9,200+ manually reviewed pages with more than 145,000+ weighted UX performance scores to compare against. Get access to 92,000+ best- and worst-practice implementation examples categorized across the 600+ guidelines (searchable & performance-verified).
Baymard’s team of researchers continuously updates the UX benchmark, providing you with the latest design patterns and an accurate picture of the current competitive landscape.
“Baymard produces some of the most relevant and actionable user experience research available. They really understand the needs of UX and Product Management professionals, and their deep experience in the eCommerce field allows them to offer sophisticated, nuanced insights.”
The 100+ Research Topics
The research is divided into 100+ topics, providing your design and development teams with in-depth UX documentation that’s highly actionable during redesigns, decision meetings, and design & development sprints.
Each of these 100+ topics include
- 5-15 actionable in-depth UX guidelines;
- a UX performance breakdown for the industry;
- 300-900 best and worst-practice examples from leading sites.
5 × Homepage & Category Topics
Homepage & Category
Homepage
Homepage
The primary objectives of a site’s homepage, the opportunities it can provide to both new and repeat users, the homepage structure & design, carousels, personalization, and promotions.
Homepage & Category
Category Taxonomy
Category Taxonomy
The structural foundation of a site’s product categories, including information architecture, catalog breadth, and category naming.
Homepage & Category
Main Navigation
Main Navigation
The visual design of an e-commerce site's taxonomy, including mega drop-down menus, the visual hierarchy, and courtesy navigation.
Homepage & Category
Intermediary Category Pages
Intermediary Category Pages
How Intermediary Category Pages can guide users toward better-defined categories and products using inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content.
Homepage & Category
Site-Wide Layout
Site-Wide Layout
How general site-wide elements should be designed and positioned, including considerations on newsletter dialogs, ad positioning, footer, and return policy links.
5 × On-Site Search Topics
On-Site Search
Search Query Types
Search Query Types
The prerequisites for a great search experience: understand the 12 different types of search queries that users typically submit on e-commerce sites, which your site’s search engine needs to support.
On-Site Search
Search Form & Logic
Search Form & Logic
Search form design and function, both pre- and post-search, with usability considerations on the design and behavior of the search field itself, query persistence, search scope selection, etc.
On-Site Search
Search Autocomplete
Search Autocomplete
How the autocomplete (also known as 'predictive search') should be designed, the types of suggestions it should make (products vs queries), keyboard input behavior, and more.
On-Site Search
Results Logic & Guidance
Results Logic & Guidance
How to create a seamless query integration process, including how to guide users toward better paths through methods such as suggesting new queries, scopes, and ‘No results’ pages.
On-Site Search
Results Layout & Filtering
Results Layout & Filtering
Layout and design of search results and how to implement filtering, dynamic list layouts, search snippets, loading more results, faceted search filters, value truncation, filter naming, dynamic sorting, and more.
10 × Product Lists & Filtering Topics
Product Lists & Filtering
List Layout
List Layout
How to create a list layout that bolsters product browsing experiences, with guidelines on the design and features of the overall product list layout, including grid and list layouts.
Product Lists & Filtering
Loading Products
Loading Products
How to load items in a product list, including guidelines on how new items should be loaded, how many items should be displayed by default, how to approach novel navigation methods, and more.
Product Lists & Filtering
List Items: Product Info & Thumbnails
List Items: Product Info & Thumbnails
Information to include in List Items, formatting and displaying information, displaying product variations as one or multiple List Items, what product thumbnails to display, and more.
Product Lists & Filtering
List Items: Interface & Hit Areas
List Items: Interface & Hit Areas
Presenting and arranging information in List Items, including showcasing product features, List Item hover effects, and more.
Product Lists & Filtering
List Items: Personalization
List Items: Personalization
How sites can personalize List Items to suit each unique user by inferring user interests through filtering and sorting observations, context-aware product thumbnails, and contextual compatibility notices.
Product Lists & Filtering
Filtering: Available Filters
Filtering: Available Filters
Which filtering types users need to narrow down product lists, incl. thematic filters, considerations for accessory products, user-defined ranges for all numeric filtering values, and more.
Product Lists & Filtering
Filtering: Scope & Logic
Filtering: Scope & Logic
Common pitfalls and optimizations such as avoiding filter attributes as category scopes, explaining industry-specific filters, and allowing users to combine multiple filter values of the same filter type.
Product Lists & Filtering
Filtering: Interface & Layout
Filtering: Interface & Layout
Layout and interface styling and the discoverability of filters, incl. how to visually nest sidebar categories, when to truncate filters, and considering a horizontal unified sorting and filtering tool.
Product Lists & Filtering
Sorting
Sorting
How to provide innovative and forward-thinking product selection with guidelines on the default sort type, avoiding most alphabetical sorting, sorting interface and scope, as well as the sort types needed.
Product Lists & Filtering
Comparison Tool
Comparison Tool
When a comparison tool is appropriate and how both its selection process and comparison page should be designed, when to have a comparison feature, and how to design the compare link and comparison view.
12 × Product Page Topics
Product Page
Product Page Layout
Product Page Layout
The 4 predominant Product Details Page layouts used in e-commerce: ‘Horizontal Tabs’, ‘Sticky TOCs’, ‘Collapsed Sections’, ‘One Long Page’, how they each perform, and which layout to generally avoid.
Product Page
Product Images
Product Images
How users rely on images on the product page, the 7 different product image types users generally need, the amount of images needed, and how large sites can approach some of the image sourcing.
Product Page
Image Gallery UI
Image Gallery UI
How to design a high-performing imagery gallery that serves as the perfect container for the product images, incl. image navigation, how to zoom images, overlays, default image size, etc.
Product Page
Product Video & 360-View
Product Video & 360-View
‘Rich visuals’ like product video and 360-views, how users utilize it, and the features each of these need in order for users to be able to reliably control the content.
Product Page
The 'Buy' Section
The 'Buy' Section
The design and position of elements such as the ‘Add to Cart’ button, prices & discounts, the quantity field, ‘Out of Stock’, ‘Save to List’, etc.
Product Page
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
The best-performing designs for displaying shipping and return info at the product page, the amount of info required, along with how to best present “Free Shipping”, handle gifting, and "Find in Store" features.
Product Page
Product Variations
Product Variations
The selection interface for color and size variations, reusing content across variations, size guides, along with the interfaces required for both product customizations and personalizations.
Product Page
Product Descriptions
Product Descriptions
How users engage with and rely on product information and descriptions, the type of content needed, product headlines sub-titles, along with both the text structure and styling that performs the best.
Product Page
Specifications Sheet
Specifications Sheet
How users engage with spec sheets, and how both the spec sheet layout, spec sheet features, and post-processing of vendor data are critical for making users less prone to users misread the specs.
Product Page
User Reviews
User Reviews
The user review submission form, review filtering, sorting & navigation, rating distribution summaries, and more.
Product Page
Auxiliary Content
Auxiliary Content
A variety of auxiliary content types found on e-commerce product pages, such as Q&A, FAQs, product manuals, social media tools, and expert-generated content.
Product Page
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
Cross-sells and cross-navigation and users’ overall success at locating their desired products, incl. cross-sell design, placement, and logic, and cross-navigation elements such as 'Recently Viewed', parent links, etc.
17 × Cart & Checkout Topics
Cart & Checkout
Checkout Types
Checkout Types
The UX benefits and inherent usability pitfalls of a multistep checkout flow, accordion checkouts, and one-step checkouts.
Cart & Checkout
Shopping Cart & “Added to Cart” Behavior
Shopping Cart & “Added to Cart” Behavior
The shopping cart page, incl. cart design, quantity and save features, the page response when users add products to the cart on the product page (drop-down cart, etc.).
Cart & Checkout
Account Selection & Creation
Account Selection & Creation
Checkout flows for signed in users, users creating an account, or checking out as a guest, incl. account-selection designs and communication,‘Delayed Account Creation’, social media accounts, password rules.
Cart & Checkout
Customer & Address Information
Customer & Address Information
How to handle the form fields for all personal user data, incl. privacy concerns, shipping addresses, billing addresses, international addresses, phone fields, address auto-detection techniques, etc.
Cart & Checkout
Gifting Flow & Features
Gifting Flow & Features
How the checkout flow and fields need to change when users gift-mark items, where and how users should be able to gift-mark items, and how the actual gifting features needs to be presented to avoid issues.
Cart & Checkout
Shipping & Store Pickup
Shipping & Store Pickup
Shipping and store pickup, incl. the shipping method UI, shipping descriptions, order cut-off times, ‘Free Shipping’ tiers, how omni-channel sites best integrate 'Store Pickup' and 'Store Availability', and more.
Cart & Checkout
Payment Flow & Methods (Incl. Third-Party)
Payment Flow & Methods (Incl. Third-Party)
The payment methods interface, how to integrate and display an array of different third-party payment methods, the gift card redemption flow, and more.
Cart & Checkout
Credit Card Form
Credit Card Form
How to cause as few abandonments as possible, incl. the credit card field design, card validation logic and formatting, expiration date, security code, and cardholder name inputs, field sequence, card icons, and card type selection.
Cart & Checkout
Order Review
Order Review
How to properly design the final 'Review' step before a user completes an order, including ‘Place Order’ button placement, and necessary review data, along with the editing flow for those users who need to change data.
Cart & Checkout
Order Confirmation & E-Mail
Order Confirmation & E-Mail
The implementation of post-purchase confirmations, incl. the information and actions needed on the order confirmation page and order confirmation email.
Cart & Checkout
Form & Page Design
Form & Page Design
How to design and position the cart link in the site wide header and primary button throughout the checkout, minimizing form intimidation, avoiding multi-column layouts, using ‘Enclosed Checkout’ designs, etc.
Cart & Checkout
User Interactions & Distractions
User Interactions & Distractions
How to implement load indicators, when to provide feedback on user actions, where to avoid ‘Apply’ buttons, embedding content from third-parties, and much more on interactive components.
Cart & Checkout
Cross-Sells
Cross-Sells
How to thoughtfully incorporate cross-sells into a checkout flow, including the use of active vs. passive cross-selling, adapting cross-sells to user context, and pitfalls of specific placements and wording.
Cart & Checkout
Validation Errors & Data Persistence
Validation Errors & Data Persistence
Error recovery and address validation experiences, incl. how to improve users' ability to locate, understand, and resolve errors, and more.
Cart & Checkout
Field Labels & Microcopy
Field Labels & Microcopy
How to mark optional and required fields, appropriate label positions, inline labels, optimizing microcopy and descriptions, and marking of optional and required fields.
Cart & Checkout
Field Design & Features
Field Design & Features
The proper selection and assembly of form elements, inputs, and selections, incl. choosing the right type of interface, field masking and character restrictions, and more.
Cart & Checkout
Default Values & Autocompletion
Default Values & Autocompletion
Intelligent form features such as making inferred selections, prefilling form fields, browser auto-fills, and personalization of the checkout flow — smart form field features that improve checkout UX substantially.
7 × Accounts & Self-Service Topics
Accounts & Self-Service
Account Drop-Down
Account Drop-Down
Placement of the "My Account" drop-down menu, account features to include, how the "My Account" drop-down should be structured and styled, personalization, and what "My Account" drop-down implementations should be avoided.
Accounts & Self-Service
Account Dashboard
Account Dashboard
Providing paths to all 'My Account' features, highlighting recent orders, limiting ads, and using icons; dashboard designs that use a sidebar or 'Cards' for navigation.
Accounts & Self-Service
Account Sign In
Account Sign In
Account sign in, including password reset and account lockouts, "Soft" sign in, automatic sign out, sign in when accessing order tracking from an order status email, and where users should be sent after sign in.
Accounts & Self-Service
'Your Account': Addresses, Payments, & Newsletters
'Your Account': Addresses, Payments, & Newsletters
Credit card updating, default addresses, editing vs. adding a new address, newsletter frequency and 'unsubscribe', confirmations, and 'Apply' buttons.
Accounts & Self-Service
Orders & Order Tracking
Orders & Order Tracking
Order list item design, order tracking pages, third-party order tracking, how users get to order tracking, guest order tracking, order status emails, order cancellation, order receipts, and order status filters.
Accounts & Self-Service
Order Returns
Order Returns
Initiating, moving through, and finalizing a return online; returns costs, shipping methods, in-store returns, shipping labels, and packaging returns.
Accounts & Self-Service
Account-Wide Navigation, Structure, & Information
Account-Wide Navigation, Structure, & Information
How to layout and structure information and navigation, describe complex flows or features, and finding and understanding self-service features, and the courtesy navigation.
31 × Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App) Topics
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Homepage
Mobile Homepage
How to design a high performing mobile homepage, the opportunities it can provide to both new and repeat mobile users, homepage structure, carousels, personalization, promotions, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Main Navigation
Mobile Main Navigation
How to design the main mobile navigation, incl. the visual hierarchy, the levels of nesting, how the mobile nav. needs to differ from desktop, courtesy navigation, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Category Taxonomy
Mobile Category Taxonomy
The structural foundation of a mobile site’s product categories, including mobile information architecture, catalog breadth, and category naming.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Category Pages
Mobile Category Pages
How Mobile Category Pages can guide users toward better-defined categories and products, how to use inspirational paths, featured products, and curated content.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Search: Autocomplete
Mobile Search: Autocomplete
How the mobile autocomplete (aka 'predictive search') should be designed, the types of suggestions it should make, how it should align and differ to the desktop design, and more.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Search: Query Types
Mobile Search: Query Types
Understand the 10 different types of search queries that users typically submit on mobile e-commerce sites, the nuances of how users really search, and how to best support it.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Search: Design & Logic
Mobile Search: Design & Logic
The mobile search results logic and mobile search designs that perform the best with users, mobile 'no results' pages, field design, search submit, search iteration flows, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product List Layout & Features
Mobile Product List Layout & Features
Creating a balanced product list experience within the confines of a mobile screen, incl. how to design hit areas, information to include in list items, ‘Load More’ buttons, indicating product variations, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile List Item Content
Mobile List Item Content
How information to include in Mobile List Items, formatting and displaying info, what product thumbnails to display and how to design them, making products easy to compare, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Filtering & Sorting: Interface, Layout, & Results
Mobile Filtering & Sorting: Interface, Layout, & Results
This topic covers how to ensure users can find the mobile filtering and sorting interfaces, how to design the interface to make it easier to locate filter types and options of interest, and how the process of applying filters and sorting options differs from the desktop process.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Filtering & Sorting: Filter & Sort Types
Mobile Filtering & Sorting: Filter & Sort Types
This topic covers which filtering and sorting types users need to organize and narrow down product lists to a manageable selection, including filtering by price, user ratings, compatibility, themes, ‘New Arrivals’, ‘Sales’ or ‘Deals’, and more.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Layout
Mobile Product Pages: Layout
Mobile product page UX, including the optimal layout that addresses users' lack of page overview, how to best design product page features and content.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Product Images & Videos
Mobile Product Pages: Product Images & Videos
How mobile users rely on images and videos on the product page, the different product image types users generally need, the amount of images needed, and how large sites can approach some of the image sourcing.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Product Image Gallery
Mobile Product Pages: Product Image Gallery
How to design a high-performing mobile image gallery that serves as the perfect container for the product images, incl. how to present additional images, the overall layout of the mobile image gallery, and the required detail and size of product images within the gallery.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Shipping, Returns, & Buying
Mobile Product Pages: Shipping, Returns, & Buying
The best-performing designs on the product page for displaying shipping and return info, including how to present offers of "free shipping", delivery date, as well as price and discount info, gifting options, and "Find in Store" features and quantity displays.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Product Variations
Mobile Product Pages: Product Variations
Products that come in multiple variations have a unique set of requirements for how variations are technically handled by the site.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Product Descriptions & Specs
Mobile Product Pages: Product Descriptions & Specs
This topic discusses how users engage with product descriptions and spec sheets, the best-performing designs to display product information, what information should be included, and where that information should be placed.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: User Reviews
Mobile Product Pages: User Reviews
How to ensure that the user reviews section of product pages leverages the power of ratings and reviews, and allows users to get an accurate and quick impression of others' assessments of products.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Product Pages: Cross-Sells
Mobile Product Pages: Cross-Sells
The vital role of cross-sells-sells and cross-navigation in users’ overall success at locating desired products, including cross-sell design, placement, and logic, and cross-navigation elements like breadcrumbs, recently viewed, parent category links, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Shopping Cart
Mobile Checkout: Shopping Cart
The mobile shopping cart page, incl. mobile cart design, quantity and save features, estimating order total, displaying fees, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Account Selection & Creation
Mobile Checkout: Account Selection & Creation
How to best optimize guest-checkout for mobile devices, incl. account sign-in and password fields, along with account createion. signing up for an account.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Gifting Flow & Features
Mobile Checkout: Gifting Flow & Features
How the checkout flow and fields need to change when users gift-mark items, where and how users should be able to gift-mark items, and how the actual gifting features needs to be presented to avoid issues.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: User Info
Mobile Checkout: User Info
How to best handle the form fields for all personal user data on mobile, incl. privacy concerns, addresses, international addresses, phone fields, auto-detection techniques, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Payment
Mobile Checkout: Payment
The payment methods interface, how to display 3rd party payment methods, the many nuances of creating high-performing credit card form field on mobile, and more.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Shipping & Store Pickup
Mobile Checkout: Shipping & Store Pickup
The shipping and store-pickup designs that perform the best on mobile, including displaying and describing shipping costs and speed, how to display store pickup, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Order Review & Confirmation
Mobile Checkout: Order Review & Confirmation
Mobile order review steps and confirmation pages, incl. how users review their order info, how they can best edit it, along with what to include on order confirmations.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Checkout: Layout and Features
Mobile Checkout: Layout and Features
All layouts and features that are used throughout the mobile checkout flow, including load indicators, primary buttons, the overall checkout design, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Forms: Form Fields
Mobile Forms: Form Fields
How mobile form field nuances can either aid or hinder mobile users' checkout completion, in particular how form fields should be labeled, marked, and placed within mobile checkouts.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Forms: Field Validation
Mobile Forms: Field Validation
How to ensure mobile users don't get stuck when they run into a validation error, incl. writing helpful error messages, how to position error messages on mobile, how users correct info, how to design address validator alerts, etc.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Forms: Input Optimization
Mobile Forms: Input Optimization
How sites can greatly optimize the mobile form-filling experience for users, through field simplificaiton, smart defaults and autodetections, incl. all touch keyboard optimizations.
Mobile E-Commerce (Mobile Web and Native App)
Mobile Site-Wide Features & Elements
Mobile Site-Wide Features & Elements
How to design site-wide mobile features that perform well with users, incl. 'Install App', 'Save Product', location requests, overlay dialogs, 'live chat', footer sections, etc.
19 × Industry-Specific Collections
Industry-Specific
Apparel
Apparel
The findings from our large-scale testing of Apparel sites with more than 500+ apparel relevant UX guidelines, 12,000+ UX performance scores and 7,300+ best practice examples from apparel sites.
Industry-Specific
Mass Merchant
Mass Merchant
The findings from our large-scale testing of Mass Merchant sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 11,900+ UX performance scores, and 7,300+ best practice examples from Mass Merchant sites.
Industry-Specific
Electronics & Office
Electronics & Office
The findings from our large-scale testing of electronics and office sites sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 7,755+ UX performance scores, and 6,000+ best practice examples from electronics and office sites.
Industry-Specific
Home & Hardware
Home & Hardware
The findings from our large-scale testing of Home Improvement & Hardware sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 3,500+ UX performance scores, and 2,100+ best practice examples from Home & Hardware sites.
Industry-Specific
Houseware & Furnishings
Houseware & Furnishings
The findings from our large-scale testing of Houseware & Furnishings sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 7,400+ UX performance scores, and 4,500+ best practice examples.
Industry-Specific
Health & Beauty
Health & Beauty
The findings from our large-scale testing of Health & Beauty sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 5,000+ UX performance scores, and 2,100+ best practice examples from Health & Beauty sites.
Industry-Specific
Direct-To-Consumer (DTC)
Direct-To-Consumer (DTC)
The findings from our large-scale testing of Direct To Consumer sites (DTC). The 400+ DTC relevant UX guidelines cover both larger DTC brands and, especially, the nuances needed for smaller less established niche DTC brands.
Industry-Specific
Digital Subscriptions & SaaS
Digital Subscriptions & SaaS
The findings from our large-scale testing of Digital Subscription and SaaS sites. 190+ UX guidelines, 7,000+ UX performance scores, and 3,000 Best Practice examples from sites like Teams, Zoom, Slack, Adobe, Dropbox, Norton, Netflix, etc.
Industry-Specific
Sports, Toys, & Hobbies
Sports, Toys, & Hobbies
The findings from our large-scale testing of Sports, Toys, & Hobbies sites providing you with 500+ relevant UX guidelines, 6,500+ UX performance scores, and 3,100+ best practice examples from the industry.
Industry-Specific
Business-to-Business
Business-to-Business
270+ in-depth UX guidelines that are particularly important to B2B e-commerce sites, illustrated with 2,300+ UX performance scores and 1,090+ best practice examples from B2B sites.
Industry-Specific
Online Grocery
Online Grocery
380+ in-depth User Experience guidelines that are particularly important to online grocery websites, with 3,500 UX performance scores and 1,550+ best practice examples from online grocery sites like Ocado, Albertsons, FreshDirect, Peapod, Sainsbury's.
Industry-Specific
Meal Kit
Meal Kit
The findings from our large-scale testing of Meal Kit websites. Providing you with in 500+ UX guidelines for Meal Kit sales sites, incl. best practice examples and test findings from Blue Apron, Dinnerly, Gobble, HelloFresh, Home Chef, Sunbasket, etc.
Industry-Specific
Online Food Delivery
Online Food Delivery
The findings from our large-scale testing of Online Food Delivery mobile apps and websites. Providing you with 370 UX guidelines for Food Delivery apps and sites, incl. best practice test findings from DoorDash, Uber Eats, Starbucks, Chipotle, Domino's, etc.
Industry-Specific
Travel Accommodation
Travel Accommodation
The findings from our large-scale testing of Online Travel Agency, Hotel, & Whole-Property Rental websites. 360+ UX guidelines for Accommodation sites, incl. best practice examples and test findings from Expedia, IHG, Hilton, Airbnb, Vrbo, and Boutique hotels.
Industry-Specific
Telco
Telco
400+ UX guidelines particularly important to telco and ISP sites, illustrated with 2,400+ UX performance scores and 1,625+ best practice examples from telco sites like Verizon, Xfinity, Bell, Vodafone, & Orange.
Industry-Specific
Luxury Goods
Luxury Goods
400+ UX guidelines particularly important to sites in the Luxury Goods industry, illustrated with 3,300+ UX performance scores and 1,800+ best practice examples from luxury sites like Gucci, TAG Heuer, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Bang & Olufsen, and Van Cleef & Arpels.
Industry-Specific
Consumables Subscription Services
Consumables Subscription Services
The findings from our large-scale testing of ‘Consumables Subscription Service’ websites that sell subscriptions for physical products. 350+ UX guidelines for Consumables Subscription Service sites.
Industry-Specific
Product Configurators
Product Configurators
74 guidelines that our usability testing reveals to have a high UX impact on sites with product configurators and configuration flows.
Industry-Specific
Sites with Physical Stores
Sites with Physical Stores
37 guidelines that our usability testing reveals to have a high UX impact on sites that also have a physical store, and offers either store pickup (BOPIS), store locators, or in-store availability.
6 × Special Interest Collections
Special Interest
'Low Cost'
'Low Cost'
A collection of 124 verified “Low Cost” guidelines, which are relatively cheap to implement for the average site, making this 124 "quick wins".
Special Interest
Accessibility for E-Commerce
Accessibility for E-Commerce
How to implement accessibility-compliance requirements specifically for e-commerce sites. Including considerations for images, links, form fields, page setup, site structure, and overall visual design requirements.
Special Interest
'Missed Opportunity'
'Missed Opportunity'
A collection of 122 “Missed Opportunity” guidelines. These 122 guidelines have a high UX impact on end users, but a high proportion of websites also get them wrong.
Special Interest
'Web Convention'
'Web Convention'
A collection of 78 “Web Convention” guidelines. These UI patterns are those users are by far most accustomed to — simply because these patterns are used at 80+% of the world’s largest online retailers.
Special Interest
'COVID-19' Related
'COVID-19' Related
From a UX perspective, the current COVID-19 crises set special requirements for e-commerce sites. This list covers 45 guidelines on how to best address general user concerns over product availability, shipping, order tracking, returns, etc.
Special Interest
'UX Basics'
'UX Basics'
A collection of 143 “UX Basics” guidelines. These 143 guidelines are those we consistently observe to have the highest UX impact on end users and are each often the sole cause for direct site abandonments.
“I can confirm that the list was fully implemented. Every time we put up a change we either A/B test or we watch it very closely to determine that it’s doing better and not the opposite. So I can confirm that these fixes have improved our checkout. Thanks for everything.”
The 3 Plans for Baymard Premium
Empower your e-commerce UX and organization with Baymard Premium research and tools. Depending on your organization, budget, and needs, there are 3 plans to choose from:
Refund Policy: We stand by our research and offer you a full 14 days “no questions asked” refund. If you’re not satisfied, simply e-mail us at support@baymard.com for a full refund.
Return On Investment: You get this toolset and these 78,000+ hours of UX research at an annual cost that’s around the same as you’d pay for just 10–40 hours of consulting at a design or development agency. Our clients find they get a significant return on investment if they implement just a handful of the 600+ guidelines.
Currency: All listed prices are in USD. We also accept Euro for Invoice payments (available on the Medium and Large plans).
What Our Clients Say
Baymard’s research is used by more than 3,000 brands, agencies, researchers, and UX designers, across 80+ countries, and includes 71% of all Fortune 500 e-commerce companies.
“Baymard’s training provides the proper language and sound evidence to understand what it mean to create a truly usable interface in the ecommerce business.”
“Intelligent, consumer-focused insights that are clear and actionable. The team in the room really loved the way the Baymard Institute highlighted the optimizations in the various user experience elements (copy, layout, design, calls-to-action…), from the perspective of consumer struggles. Baymard’s Usability research really complements our other existing research tools.”
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“These reports are fabulous. The content is exactly what our team has been looking for, and so much more! Extremely helpful, thank you!”
“We implemented “E-Commerce Checkout Usability” guide for all our stores and saw doubling of checkout conversion rates. We will soon work on implementation of other usability guidelines. Thank you Christian and Jamie for your excellent work!”
“Some time ago we purchased the Ecommerce Homepage & Category report - the research and insights are extremely useful to us and help us a lot in our work!”
“I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for the amazing work on this audit. You should know that this has been very well received internally and there’s a lot of excitement around adopting the ideas you have shared.”
“My team loves Baymard Premium and it has become a valuable tool for us. We consult with a number of large brands and manage their eComm (both DTC and eRetail) and your data is amazing, it gives us all the testing data without having to run the tests ourselves. Our clients appreciate us having the depth of knowledge Baymard provides, we’ve used Baymard data multiple times to defend our recommendations and to inform our designs.”
“Damn. The reports that the @Baymard folks do cost money, but they’re worth it.”
“I’m an avid user of your reports and recommendations. I have leveraged your articles and findings for my previous B2B work at Grainger, B2C work at Ulta, and now I’m at Hyatt. Thanks”
“This was indeed very helpful guidance and a very well-documented roadmap for us to fix, validate, organize, collectively understand and continually improve our ecommerce foundation.”
“I can confirm that the list was fully implemented. Every time we put up a change we either A/B test or we watch it very closely to determine that it’s doing better and not the opposite. So I can confirm that these fixes have improved our checkout. Thanks for everything.”
“I can not tell you how much help your benchmark studies have been for our company, e-commerce and UX teams. We have used and continue to use these reports for baseline benchmarks as we build test protocols or eye tracking scripts etc. in lab.”
“Excellent tool – looking forward to using it with our other sites and prototypes as they’re developed.”
“I really like the work Baymard Institute does around usability. Their articles often get my Ecom gears turning.”
“We’ve received some awesome feedback from our Merchant Success team as well as our merchants about all of the UX Audits we’ve had thus far with Baymard. Thank you so much to you and your team for all of your hard work. The pilot with Baymard has been going fantastic and I’m really excited with all that we’re learning! You have an amazing platform, team and super helpful data base for us to work with.”
“This #ecommerce checkout guide is worth every penny. Highly recommended. #cro http://t.co/FPVAYDr1”
“Thank you very much for the 7 usability audits of our country-specific sites. The audits have provided us with specific and actionable advice, allowed us to prioritize development resources , and enabled us to compare UX performance between the 7 different country-specific sites, and against State of the Art implementations. The audit itself is done really professionally and the recommendations contain actionable and insightful information.”
“Thank you. This was an excellent piece of work: professional, thorough, and actionable for the team. We’re very happy with the work Baymard has done for us so far, and I hope we’ll have the chance to work together again on future projects.”
“Great UX report on shopping cart checkout forms/process we have used in a few audits recently. http://t.co/vkpeYOAS”
“It is immensely valuable having a thorough, independent study to help validate my work and in particular, help facilitate buy-off from stakeholders. Baymard has quickly become one of my most trusted resources for the UX/UI field.”
“I am just thrilled by this study, it’s helped me in the construction of my online store checkout. All points in this study make incredible sense, and I cannot help but incorporate all of these suggestions. Incredible.”
“Thanks for everything. The audit was extremely useful, I think we have gained valuable insight.”
“I have found the M-Commerce and E-Commerce reports very useful, thank you!”
“The recommendations in our Checkout Usability Audit were awesome - well prioritized, actionable and helped us focus on what to optimize. This audit, along with the e-Commerce Usability Reports & Benchmark Databases, are my go-to resources for thorough, insightful information. Thank you!”
“Given the tricky science of conversion rate optimization, it is great to know that you are dealing with professionals whose advice is based on solid research. It was a pleasure collaborating with the Baymard team.”
“This is very, very useful! Let me check what we can do to improve the usability in the Smashing Shop.”
“Wow, this is great! Just reviewed it with the team. It’s a huge help and we’re excited to fix these issues.”
“The walkthrough today was great. The report was very, very well done and loaded with great opportunities for us to improve our business. I wanted to again express my appreciation for working with us on such a condensed time frame last month. You and your team have been amazing partners to us and we very much appreciate the work, expertise and partnership.”
“We like what we are reviewing from the audit - great analysis and feedback.”
“We have worked with a number of third party companies before on various projects/audits, and I can certainly say that working with Baymard was not only a pleasure; but you delivered on time; to the level of depth we wanted; addressing important issues; and answering all our questions; and you did all this for a great price. A big THANK YOU on behalf of N11.”
“Baymard’s real-user research is invaluable for ecommerce marketers. It leaves no stone unturned, and with the guideline checklists provided, you’ll be well equipped to optimize your mobile presence.”
“We found the audits extremely helpful and validated a number of changes we have been wanting to make or are in the process of making, so thank again for all the great insights.”
“The Baymard reports have proven to be an invaluable resource for us. Comprehensive, pragmatic and actionable. We have redesigned our checkout process and made changes to our category pages based on usability guidelines in the reports.”
“The Baymard Institute have some seriously good reports on ecommerce usability, design, and best practices: http://t.co/cuxO3VwiVe”
“Worth every dollar. It’s well done, good looking and simply very useful.”
“I love the information that you guys provide and have bought a couple of reports. Love them.”
“Really good rundown on all these thing. I definitely think we got a lot of value out of it, and we’re excited to get it all in and do some A/B testing on this.”
“We implemented the majority of your checkout recommendations and a/b tested most of them, in every instance your recommendation provided the catalyst for us to make an improvement. Your approach and methodology has proven itself to be valuable. Now, when a new report comes out from your office we just buy it right away.”
“Baymard’s UX training week was invaluable. Christian presented the company’s vast research in an organized and digestible format that encouraged actionable takeaways. I can’t wait to share these learnings with my colleagues!”
“You guys help us, our clients (and our clients’ users), in delivering a better user experience through your research. I really appreciate it.”
“I wanted to write you a note to tell you how much I’ve gotten out of the Usability Benchmark I bought this Summer. We often get asked to for help with checkout usability and I often refer people your way. Keep up the great work!”
“This is without a doubt the most important eCommerce training I’ve ever done. Knowing the right approach for converting the average user puts us massively ahead of the competition.”
“Love Baymard’s Checkout Usability Report, http://t.co/zPb64Auk. A must read for E-Comm UX teams.”
“The Baymard team has been a delight to work with on the JohnLewis digital platform audit for 2020. They responded to the brief very well, have been very accessible for ongoing clarification and queries and Rebecca was excellent in the recent team share, articulately presenting findings in an engaging walk through with the wider team which will really support driving engagement and a robust response. Many thanks for all the effort and focus folks.”
“If you are a User Experience Designer and have not read this report on check out form usability, than you should http://t.co/tdw0CKjY #UX”
“Thank you for the UX audit presentation, it was FANTASTIC. People here are quite pleased and amazed by the amount of work that was put into this.”
“Here at Boxed we’re a small team who are BIG fans of your research. Your services have been immensely helpful to us as a small UX/UI team, and we are so excited to have a new version of our own product page going into development later this month.”
“I just wanted to reach out to you personally and commend you for hosting a terrific course. It’s quite seldom I find myself learning quite as much and gaining so many new perspectives in such a short period of time. So please keep up the good work and keep on inspiring other fellow UX practitioners!”
“designing a checkout experience? This is one of the coolest resource I’ve seen: http://t.co/CB1X2GTY”
“I’m very impressed! Not about our site’s performance, quite the opposite, but about your work. Very detailed and packed with great and tangible advice. This was exactly what I dreamt about, but sometimes you just have to be careful dreaming.”
“We implemented this [1 of the 15 audit suggestions] and since then we’ve had a 20% increase in warranties added and a pretty healthy average order increase because of that. That was a great suggestion, it hit our bottom line immediately.”
“I often refer to myself as ‘the worst type of user’ because I have adapted to standard/bad UX practices when browsing eCommerce sites. I have found Baymard Institute is an incredible resource for getting some insight into user behaviour for making websites foolproof.”
“after benchmarking checkouts for a couple of hours last week… this resource is magical http://t.co/ISKOfyGE”
“Truly a great learning experience about almost every aspect of eCommerce and the steps you need to take to improve the shopping experience for your users. Everyone working with eCommerce should attend this course. Absolutely worth the investment!”
“I really enjoy what you guys do. I bought your guide over a year ago to help a large website I consult to improve their checkout.”
“We implemented these guidelines on a client’s website and our e-commerce conversion rate increased 18.7% across the board. Most importantly our mobile conversions increased from 0.89% to 1.9% – we doubled our mobile revenue.”
“The Baymard E-commerce Usability reports have proven to be a valuable resource for UX teams within our organisation both at group and operating company level. The reports contain precise, actionable insights and recommendations which are backed up by extensive research and data. The severity and frequency ratings have helped our development teams to prioritise which areas to improve first. The most recent improvements we’ve recommended from the Ecommerce Search report have been extremely well received by senior stakeholders and have already been fed into the backlog.”
“I wanted to pass on some praise to the Baymard team. I’m doing some desk research at the moment into best practices for navigation, search and filtering, and I’ve been using a lot of Baymard reports. Even though we’re not in the e-comm business, the insights you provide have been invaluable and inspirational to my project. It’s really really great work. I’ve previously grazed the content before out of interest, but now that I’m actually putting it into practice, I’m really feeling the value of this work. Thanks for making it available so that the whole community can benefit.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I think your site is the best thousand bucks I’ve ever spent. I wish I found you years ago.”
“Christian Holst and his team have done it again. Rock-solid research backed up by numbers that can’t be argued with. We’ve been using Baymard’s research for many years now and consistently find value in it in the form of highly applicable guidelines. The cost of the annual subscription has paid for itself many times over. Thank you for that, Christian.”
“Baymard has helped so much: UX was a brand new role at my company when I was hired. I was researching, planning, and designing UX & UI for 5 different products, all by myself. After showing real-world, bottom-line results from a UX centered approach to our products, we have expanded our UX team and greatly improved our UX-to-product process. Baymard’s research database was a critical component to my (and my company’s) success. Thank you!”
“We have recently tested some of your recommendations for the Avast checkout and got some great wins!”
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