Research Topic
Product Page UX
How do users interpret and interact with your product details pages?
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.
The test participants encountered 1,300+ product page related usability issues – despite testing the product pages of multi-million-dollar sites. Throughout the test sessions, the participants would repeatedly abandon sites due to issues with the product page layout, content types, or features.
These issues have subsequently been analyzed and distilled into the 110+ PDP guidelines on Product Page UX.
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.
This page provides you an overview of our research specific to Product Details Page UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.
The Current Product Page UX Performance
To accompany the usability test sessions we’ve also benchmarked 319 leading US and European e-commerce sites across our most important Product Page usability guidelines. Our Product Page UX benchmark database contains 18,000+ product page site elements that have been manually reviewed and scored by Baymard’s team of UX researchers, along with 16,000+ best and worst practice examples from leading e-commerce sites in the US and Europe.
The UX performance scores from our most recent Product Page UX benchmark update are plotted in the interactive scatterplot above.
The high-level benchmark results show that only 49% of e-commerce sites have an overall “decent” or “good” UX performance for their product pages, while 51% of sites have “mediocre” or worse product page implementations.
On the extreme ends of performance, only a couple of sites had a very “poor” Product Page UX performance that failed to align with commonly observed user behavior in our large-scale PDP testing. This is a fortunate shift upward from 2021, which previously had 4% of sites with below “poor” performances. At the other end of the scale, there aren’t any sites with an overall “Perfect” or “State of the Art” product page implementation (unchanged since 2021).
While there has been positive performance growth within this theme, If we look at the UX performances within the 12 topics of Product Page UX, there remain large fluctuations and wide performance ranges in both the individual site’s and the average site’s performance.
Clearly, there’s much room for improvement in e-commerce Product Page UX.
This is a sub-set of the full benchmark which includes 319 e-commerce sites.
View our full UX benchmark
2,900+ Categorized Product Page UX Examples
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Explore design patterns across 2,900+ examples of product page designs and features from leading e-commerce sites, all annotated and organized into 9 different page types. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own product page design, and to get a feel for emerging trends in e-commerce product pages.
Research Articles on Product Page UX
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on Product Page UX for free in these articles:
12 Research Reports on Product Page UX
PAID RESEARCH CONTENT
All 110+ Product Page research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 12 reports (400 pages of research findings in total):
Product Page Topics
Product Page Layout
Product Page Layout
The 4 predominant Product Details Page layouts used in ecommerce: ‘Horizontal Tabs’, ‘Sticky TOCs’, ‘Collapsed Sections’, ‘One Long Page’, how they each perform, and which layout to generally avoid.
Product Page Topics
Product Images
Product Images
How users rely on images on the product page, the 7 different product image types users generally need, the amount of images needed, and how large sites can approach some of the image sourcing.
Product Page Topics
Image Gallery UI
Image Gallery UI
How to design a high-performing imagery gallery that serves as the perfect container for the product images, incl. image navigation, how to zoom images, overlays, default image size, etc.
Product Page Topics
Product Video & 360-View
Product Video & 360-View
‘Rich visuals’ like product video and 360-views, how users utilize it, and the features each of these need in order for users to be able to reliably control the content.
Product Page Topics
The ‘Buy’ Section
The ‘Buy’ Section
The design and position of elements such as the ‘Add to Cart’ button, prices & discounts, the quantity field, ‘Out of Stock’, ‘Save to List’, etc.
Product Page Topics
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
The best-performing designs for displaying shipping and return info at the product page, the amount of info required, along with how to best present “Free Shipping”, handle gifting, and “Find in Store” features.
Product Page Topics
Product Variations
Product Variations
The selection interface for color and size variations, reusing content across variations, size guides, along with the interfaces required for both product customizations and personalizations.
Product Page Topics
Product Descriptions
Product Descriptions
How users engage with and rely on product information and descriptions, the type of content needed, product headlines sub-titles, along with both the text structure and styling that performs the best.
Product Page Topics
Specifications Sheet
Specifications Sheet
How users engage with spec sheets, and how both the spec sheet layout, spec sheet features, and post-processing of vendor data are critical for making users less prone to users misread the specs.
Product Page Topics
User Reviews
User Reviews
The user review submission form, review filtering, sorting & navigation, rating distribution summaries, and more.
Product Page Topics
Auxiliary Content
Auxiliary Content
A variety of auxiliary content types found on ecommerce product pages, such as Q&A, FAQs, product manuals, social media tools, and expert-generated content.
Product Page Topics
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
Cross-sells and cross-navigation and users’ overall success at locating their desired products, incl. cross-sell design, placement, and logic, and cross-navigation elements such as ‘Recently Viewed’, parent links, etc.
Subscribe to Baymard Premium to access all of our Product Page UX research
Get full access to all our Product Page E-Commerce UX research reports, benchmarks, and page designs previewed here, along with our complete 650+ guidelines for Homepage & Category Navigation, Search, Product Listing, Checkout, Accounts & Self-Service, and Mobile E-Commerce. Utilize our 150,000+ hours of UX research to improve your Product Page user experience and to document your UX decisions.
Test Methodology
This research on Product Page UX is part of Baymard Institute’s full 150,000+ hours of large scale research catalog, which is based on:
- Usability Testing: 25 rounds of qualitative usability testing with 4,400+ test participant/site sessions following the "Think Aloud" protocol (in-person 1:1 moderated lab usability testing).
- Manual benchmarking: 54 rounds of benchmarking the world’s 319 top-grossing e-commerce sites across all 650+ UX guidelines (175,000+ implementation examples and 275,000+ UX performance scores).
- In-lab eye-tracking testing.
- Quantitative studies: 12 studies with a total of 20,240 participants.
Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.
UX Audit Service
GET YOUR PRODUCT PAGE EXPERIENCE REVIEWED
What are the 15 most important changes you can make to your e-commerce product page design and features?
We will put together a detailed 40-page report of the 15 most important usability improvements you can make to your product page implementation.
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