[VIP] Baymard Institute: Product Details Page UX - An Original UX Research Study

At Baymard Institute we’ve spent more than 2 years only testing Product Details Page UX, testing how users interpret and interact with product pages on e-commerce site, and what product page layouts, designs, content types, and features that perform the best.

Nearly all users go through a product page before making any purchase, and it’s often on the product page where users make up their mind on whether or not they want to purchase the item. This makes the product page the centerpiece of your users’ e-commerce experience. Yet at the same time, the product page layout and features tend to be under a lot of strain as they often rely on the same template re-used across the entire site’s product catalog.

The Current Product Page UX Performance

Our Product Page UX benchmark database contains 5,880 product page site elements that have been manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, with an additional 4,100 best- and worst-practice examples from the top-grossing e-commerce sites in the US and Europe.

However, the Product Page UX performance benchmark database reveal that the average site has 24 structural UX issues on its product pages, and only 18% of the 185 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites have a “good” or “acceptable” product page UX performance. The vast majority of benchmarked sites — 82% — have a “poor” or “mediocre” performance. And no sites have a “state of the art” product page UX performance.

Within their product page implementation the vast majority of e-commerce sites have multiple severe usability issues with their Specifications Sheet, Shipping & Returns, User Reviews, The ‘Buy’ Section, and Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation – which combined cause much of the overall substandard product page UX performance.