This is a case study of Sephora’s e-commerce user experience (UX) performance. It’s based on an exhaustive performance review of 1120 design elements. 250 other sites have also been benchmarked for a complete picture of the e-commerce UX landscape.
Sephora’s overall e-commerce UX performance is decent. Their UX is in large part dimished by broken Customer Accounts and mediocre Cart & Checkout.
First benchmarked in April 2012, and reviewed 26 times since then, most recently in January 2024.
Performance: 41.8Decent
URL: sephora.com
UX Award Winner (see all):
Health & BeautyTop 1%
Search, Product Page & Cart & Checkout (app)Top 1%
Overall UX Performance
1223 Guidelines · Performance:
Desktop Web
457 Guidelines · Performance:
Homepage & Category
31 Guidelines · Performance:
On-Site Search
46 Guidelines · Performance:
Product Lists & Filtering
75 Guidelines · Performance:
Product Page
103 Guidelines · Performance:
Cart & Checkout
123 Guidelines · Performance:
Customer Accounts
37 Guidelines · Performance:
Site-Wide Features
15 Guidelines · Performance:
Order Tracking & Returns
27 Guidelines · Performance:
Mobile Web
417 Guidelines · Performance:
Mobile App
349 Guidelines · Performance:
To learn how we calculate our performance scores and read up on our evaluation criteria and scoring algorithm head over to our Methodology page.
The scatterplot you see above is the free version we make public to all our users. If you wish to dive deeper and learn about each guideline and even review your own site you’ll need to get premium access.
33 pages of Sephora’s e-commerce site, marked up with 351 best practice examples:
27 pages of Sephora’s e-commerce site, marked up with 300 best practice examples:
30 pages of Sephora’s e-commerce site, marked up with 196 best practice examples:
Every week, we publish a new article on how to build “state of the art” e-commerce experiences — here’s 5 popular ones:
Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them
Format the “Expiration Date” Fields Exactly the Same as the Physical Credit Card (72% Don’t)
PDP UX: Core Product Content Is Overlooked in ‘Horizontal Tabs’ Layouts (Yet 28% of Sites Have This Layout)
Form Field Usability: Avoid Extensive Multicolumn Layouts (16% Make This Form Usability Mistake)
Form Usability: Getting ‘Address Line 2’ Right
See all 402 articles in the full public archive.