Ecommerce Quantitative UX: 3 High-Level Trends & Takeaways from 20+ Charts

At Baymard, we’ve released updated Quantitative Insights into the habits and preferences of online shoppers across key ecommerce stages.

These insights are survey-based data visualizations that complement and deepen our large-scale UX research findings.

The 20+ insights cover the online shopping experience across a wide range of topics: product discovery, cross-sell preferences, sale-seeking behaviors, checkout friction, return behaviors, account feature expectations, and newsletter management.

Ecommerce shoppers make decisions with deeply ingrained expectations regarding transparency, flexibility, and convenience, standards that continually evolve as the online shopping landscape evolves.

While the vast majority of our foundational data remains highly stable year after year, tracking this data over time reveals a few subtle, critical shifts in reported consumer habits.

Over the last 3 years, consumer habits show clear directional changes in how frequently shoppers make online returns for their past purchases.

Further down the funnel, they frequently leverage accounts to manage post-purchase utility, carefully balancing their participation in brand incentive structures with their tolerance for direct retailer outreach.

Each of these evolving dynamics plays out at a different stage of the user experience, highlighting exactly where optimization priorities should be re-evaluated.

In this article, we’ll highlight 3 high-level findings that reflect the most notable shifts since our previous annual study:

• Online return frequency among consumers has steadily declined over the last three years
• High email frequency from specific retailers has overtaken general inbox clutter as the top driver of newsletter unsubscribes
• Loyalty programs have climbed in priority, securing the fourth spot for online account expectations

Online Return Frequency Among Consumers Has Steadily Declined Over the Last Three Years

Online consumers exhibit a clear shift in their shopping habits as multi-year tracking reveals that frequent return rates are steadily declining.

Our latest study shows that 52% of users say they have returned at least one item purchased online in the past 12 months, with 24% returning an item just once and 28% doing so more than once.

Interestingly, tracking these responses over time reveals that the segment of shoppers who say they return items more than once has steadily dropped from 44% in 2024, down to 34% in 2025, and hitting a low of 28% this year.

Adding to this, the percentage of online shoppers who report that they haven’t returned any items over the past year has climbed significantly, rising from 26% in 2024 up to 44% in our latest data.

This multi-year decline in return frequency suggests that either retailers’ optimization tools and smarter shopping habits are successfully minimizing incorrect purchases, or consumers are simply keeping wrong items to avoid the growing frustration with restrictive return windows and added fees.

From a strategic standpoint, it’s therefore critical to minimize any unnecessary friction by ensuring return policies are highly visible and easy to understand before a user reaches checkout.

See Quantitative Insight #GC054 for an interactive version of this graph alongside key findings and actionable insights.

Retailer Overcommunication Becomes the Leading Catalyst for Newsletter Unsubscribes

While marketing newsletters remain highly critical customer retention channels, overcommunicating can quickly alienate an engaged audience.

The primary driver of customer churn has shifted since our last study, as 48% of users now say they choose to unsubscribe because marketing emails simply come too often from a specific retailer.

General inbox saturation follows closely behind on the chart, with 46% of respondents reporting that they receive too many newsletter emails in general across the collective volume of brands they follow.

Adding to this, content quality continues to heavily influence audience retention, given that 44% of users report unsubscribing because they ultimately lose interest in the newsletter content itself.

This inversion of the top two choices demonstrates that consumers are becoming less tolerant of high-frequency cadences from individual brands, making individual cadence management a higher priority than general email volume.

From a strategic standpoint, it’s therefore important to move away from binary all-or-nothing opt-outs and instead let users control email frequency through granular cadence adjustments in a dedicated preference center.

See Quantitative Insight #GC056 for an interactive version of this graph alongside key findings and actionable insights.

Loyalty Program Shifts Upward in Account Feature Priorities

Shoppers continue to view customer accounts primarily as hubs for post-purchase utility, but their relative feature priorities are changing.

As expected, logistical tracking remains the highest-priority requirement, with 51% of respondents saying that checking order status or delivery tracking is one of the most important account features an ecommerce site can offer.

Additionally, managing payment options outside the checkout flow remains vital, with 30% of shoppers reporting that they want the ability to maintain their saved credit cards independently, while 26% prioritize reviewing past order history.

When looking closely at this chart, the most notable shift from last year is that 24% of users now report that loyalty programs are a high-priority account feature, reflecting its steady increase in importance to online consumers.

This indicates that post-purchase dashboards serve an increasingly valuable secondary purpose as a centralized portal for managing brand incentives and ongoing rewards status.

To align with this shifting user expectation, ecommerce platforms should ensure that loyalty point balances, point earning history, and available rewards are integrated directly into the main account dashboard view rather than buried in secondary submenus.

See Quantitative Insight #GC051 for an interactive version of this graph alongside key findings and actionable insights.

20+ Quantitative Insights to Inform General Ecommerce UX Improvements

These are just 3 of the insights from our general ecommerce quantitative study.

Explore the full set of insights to build an in-depth picture of how general ecommerce shoppers behave and what they expect online.

Pair these insights with our 700+ UX guidelines based on observed user behavior to ground your UX design decisions in both behavioral research and survey data.

Note that we also offer industry-specific Quantitative Insights for Flight Booking & Airlines, Apparel & Accessories, Furniture & Home Decor, and Home & Hardware ecommerce shoppers.

Getting access: all 20+ general ecommerce quantitative insights are available now within Baymard. (Already have an account? Go directly to the general ecommerce quantitative study).

To find out how your ecommerce desktop site, mobile site, or app performs against industry benchmarks, learn more about a Baymard UX audit of your site or app.