Audit Service
‘Homepage & Category’ UX Audit
What are the 15 most important changes you can make to your e-commerce homepage and category design?
Product finding is key to any e-commerce business – after all, in order to buy a product your customers must be able to find it first.
Based on the 70+ findings from our desktop & mobile Homepage & Category Usability research study we will conduct a full Homepage & Category UX Audit of your e-commerce site (or prototype), outlining the 15 most important usability improvements you can make to your desktop & mobile homepage and category navigation.
The audit will focus on the desktop & mobile design and usability of your homepage, main navigation, custom category pages, sub-category pages, product lists, and cross-category navigation.
An expert Baymard auditor will write a detailed 40-page report on your desktop & mobile website with 15 usability suggestions for improvements, a comparison against the top e-commerce sites in your industry, and with best practice examples for each suggestion.
“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.”
Who is this Homepage & Category audit intended for?
- E-commerce sites that want to redesign their homepage, category navigation, or entire site, and would like inspiration before commencing an expensive redesign project.
- E-commerce sites that have already optimized their category navigation and would like a set of fresh eyes to identify the last usability improvements.
- E-commerce sites that would like to benchmark their homepage and navigation UX performance to see how it stack up against major competitors.
- Agencies and designers that are working on an e-commerce project and want reassurance that they’re on the right track with their current homepage and category navigation design.
Return on Investment
Even the smallest improvement in conversion rate for any site with significant sales will lead to a notable return on investment. For example, an improvement from 3.1% to 3.6% in conversion rate for a site with $50,000,000 annual sales will yield $8,060,000 extra sales every year.
“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.”
How Will the Audit Be Delivered? What Will It Cost?
The cost of a Homepage & Category UX Audit for both desktop and mobile is $3,700, and includes…
- A 40-50 page report with 15 suggestions for homepage and category improvements to your site as well as implementation examples.
- Each of the 15 suggestions is typically detailed across 2-3 pages: 1 page with explanation of the identified usability issue and suggested change, and 1-2 pages with implementation examples from other leading e-commerce sites.
- Two UX scorecards (mobile + desktop) with 70+ usability assessment parameters, with performance comparison against 177 top US and European e-commerce sites.
- A 1-hour video conference with you and your team to go over the results and discuss changes.
Talk to UX auditor Laura about your goals and discuss Baymard’s UX research methodology.
or email audit@baymard.com
Audit Price
$6,700
per audit
Refund Policy: In the event that we’re unable to provide 15 improvements we’ll still complete the audit and leave it up to you if you want a refund.
Confidential: All client-specific audits and UX scorecards are strictly confidential; they are not included in Baymard’s public benchmark databases or shared with anyone else.
As Baymard does not offer any kind of web design service, programming, or sell e-commerce technology, the UX audit will therefore always be a completely unbiased analysis of your site, and not an indirect “sales pitch” for other services. At Baymard our specialization is the UX auditing.
What Our Clients Say About the UX Audit
Baymard’s research is used by more than 3,000 e-commerce companies, researchers, and UX designers, from 80+ countries, and includes 71% of all Fortune 500 companies within e-commerce, including:
“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.”
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
“Thanks again for the great work on our checkout project. Our whole group found it incredibly insightful. We’re applying the suggestions you provided to our new checkout design which launches at the end of the month! One of my colleagues was also interested in your group’s competitive expertise with regard to responsive web and native apps.”
“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 for all the value delivered ahead of our new fiscal years. Your insights not only provided a definitive foundation for our UX roadmap but completely sold our executive team on the value of expert usability insights. Your service paid for itself in a matter of days and ensured all critical gaps will be filled ahead of us running the audit again next year.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The Baymard team has been a delight to work with on the JohnLewis digital platform audit. 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We have recently tested some of your recommendations for the Avast checkout and got some great wins!”
“I’m reviewing the report this morning and I am delighted. The recommendations are detailed and our resulting actions are clear. I’m excited to share this with the rest of the team!”
“We are very excited to finally proceed with the UX improvements, and I truly believe your audit report will be super helpful to put us ahead of the wave. If you ever need a reference, please do not hesitate to share my contact.”
“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.”
“This was…mind-blowing. We’ve been having conversations on the side as you’ve been presenting the audit findings. There’s so much to do!”
“Thanks for everything. The audit was extremely useful, I think we have gained valuable insight.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Thank you very much for your time and the presentation. It was super useful, comprehensive and most importantly very concrete, so that we know exactly what to do next. We will definitely recommend you to other divisions within Bosch.”
“We like what we are reviewing from the audit - great analysis and feedback.”
“I’m an avid user of your reports and recommendations. I have leveraged your articles and findings throughout my career in B2B, B2C, and hospitality.”
“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.”
“Let me say that it was exceptionally well done, and we are super excited to implement every one of the recommendations there. Everything you said has usually been a case of discussion in the past, but having them recommended in a deck like this will allow us to move forward.”
“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.”
“Within a very short time Baymard Institute provided 15 clear, useful improvement suggestions for our checkout process. We intend to implement all of them. It’s easy to find companies that offer website improvement suggestions. But, most companies don’t do their homework and don’t provide specific examples of how best to make the improvements. With Baymard Institute, the checkout process suggestions they made were intuitive, specific, and actionable. I highly recommend their audit service.”
“The recommendations in our audit were awesome - well prioritized, actionable and helped us focus on what to optimize. This audit, along with the e-Commerce Reports & Benchmark Databases, are my go-to resources for thorough, insightful information. Thank you!”
“Wow, this is great! Just reviewed it with the team. It’s a huge help and we’re excited to fix these issues.”
“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.”
“Wanted to thank you again for the checkout audit and walking us through the process. It was super helpful and we can’t wait to apply the changes to our checkout for a better user experience.”
“A great presentation, and the results were very eye-opening. It’s really helpful.”
“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.”
“Baymard recently did a UX audit of our new e-commerce Website. We were very pleased with the results. The report and live review of the findings validated our approach to user experience, and also, we learned a lot about best practices for e-commerce UX. We believe Baymard’s work will help us increase revenue and user satisfaction.”
“I just wanted to thank you guys for all of the time that you’ve put into this, and for a great presentation. We don’t have anyone at the company that has formal UX/UI experience, so being able to tap into Baymard’s resources/expertise is an immediate win for us. Some of the things you pointed out, we’ve already identified as areas for improvement (which was validating), but a lot of the recommendations are things that we hadn’t identified and are for the most part immediately actionable.”
“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.”
“A big thanks to you and the Baymard team for such an informative and valuable session. The Ace Hardware team truly appreciated the Baymard teams feedback, diligence and the overall presentation. We are looking forward to using the excellent information provided to improve the acehardware.com user journey.”
“Thanks for this audit and your good work. This was exactly what I was aiming for. Also thanks for the very, very professional presentation, and answering all our countless questions. Very good work.”
“First off, thank you. This was the most engrossed I’ve ever been in a 2-hour meeting. This [audit presentation] was incredibly insightful and very helpful. Many, many thanks.”