Baymard Institute Announces Usability Benchmark

5 September 2012

Author: Ben Logan

Passionate about improving services and experiences for the people that use them.

The Baymard Institute have been taking a look at the Top 100 grossing e-commerce sites and have today released their results, containing over three thousand examples of the best and worst practises on the web today.

The report contains almost a thousand screenshots, with annotation and insights into how many of the world’s most successful sites have confronted the e-comm checkout design challenge.

Some of the results will come as a surprise, for example 44% of sites that grossed more than $1 billion scored lower than their less successful competitors, and about half of the sites tested were found to be asking for the same information more than once.

Furthermore, there were found to be 5.08 steps from purchase to checkout on average, 10% of sites had the ability to auto-detect state and/or city, 81% automatically signed users up to their newsletter and 24% required the user to have an account with the company to complete their purchase.

The institute found that the average checkout violates 21% of usability guidelines and their report calls for since the average cart abandonment rate stands at over 65%, which is less than encouraging news for anyone running an online store.