Exploring the customer’s product page experience
A part of Baymard Premium access
This product page study provides you with 2 years’ worth of usability testing and research on product details pages, all condensed into 95 usability guidelines.
Full access to this Product Page Usability study includes 12 reports with 95 actionable product page guidelines, and a benchmark database with 5,800 UX performance scores and 4,100 categorized product page implementation examples.
(Beyond including full access to this E-Commerce Product Page research study, the Baymard Premium access also include 6 additional studies (Homepage & Category Navigation, E-Commerce Search, Product Lists & Filtering, Cart & Checkout, Mobile E-Commerce, and Account & Self-Service) with a total of 700+ guidelines covered in 70 e-commerce UX research reports)
This research-based and pragmatic toolset will help you achieve the best possible product page design, user experience, and conversion rate.
“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.”
It’s often on the product page where users make up their mind on whether or not they want to purchase the featured product. This makes the product page layout, design, and features, the centerpiece of the user’s e-commerce experience. At the same time, the product page layout and features are under a lot of strain as they’re largely a template reused for almost every single product on the site.
This original usability study focuses on exactly how users interpret and interact with the product page on e-commerce sites. The findings presented in these 12 reports (600-pages in total) are based on Baymard’s large-scale qualitative testing of e-commerce product pages, along with an additional large-scale eye-tracking test.
Throughout the test sessions, users would repeatedly abandon sites due to issues with the product page layout, content types, or features. Indeed, the test subjects encountered 1,300+ usability issues, despite testing the product pages of multi-million-dollar sites like Sears, Home Depot, Bose, Sephora, Lowe’s, etc.
In these 12 reports, we have distilled all 1,300+ product page usability issues encountered by the test subjects into 95 product page user experience guidelines, and prioritized them by UX impact – providing you with a concise set of design guidelines that will help you improve the performance of your product pages.
“I can not tell you how much help your benchmark studies have been for our company, e-commerce and UX teams. We have used and continue to use these reports for baseline benchmarks as we build test protocols or eye tracking scripts etc. in lab.”
See All 12 Topics
Product Page
Product Page Layout
Product Page
Product Page Layout
9 Guidelines, 53 Pages
The 4 predominant Product Details Page layouts used in e-commerce: ‘Horizontal Tabs’, ‘Sticky TOCs’, ‘Collapsed Sections’, ‘One Long Page’, how they each perform, and which layout to generally avoid.
Product Page
Product Images
Product Page
Product Images
9 Guidelines, 70 Pages
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
Image Gallery UI
Product Page
Image Gallery UI
10 Guidelines, 60 Pages
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
Product Video & 360-View
Product Page
Product Video & 360-View
4 Guidelines, 28 Pages
‘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
The 'Buy' Section
Product Page
The 'Buy' Section
9 Guidelines, 46 Pages
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
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
Product Page
Shipping, Returns, and Gifting
8 Guidelines, 42 Pages
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
Product Variations
Product Page
Product Variations
9 Guidelines, 40 Pages
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
Product Descriptions
Product Page
Product Descriptions
8 Guidelines, 56 Pages
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
Specifications Sheet
Product Page
Specifications Sheet
5 Guidelines, 27 Pages
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
User Reviews
Product Page
User Reviews
18 Guidelines, 147 Pages
The user review submission form, review filtering, sorting & navigation, rating distribution summaries, and more.
Product Page
Auxiliary Content
Product Page
Auxiliary Content
5 Guidelines, 28 Pages
A variety of auxiliary content types found on e-commerce product pages, such as Q&A, FAQs, product manuals, social media tools, and expert-generated content.
Product Page
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
Product Page
Cross-Sells & Cross-Navigation
8 Guidelines, 61 Pages
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.
“Baymard has been a great resource in helping us improve the customer experience. We are continually applying these best practices to our sites.”
Based on the findings of this product page research study we’ve also benchmarked the product details pages of 60 top-grossing e-commerce sites in the US and Europe. This provides you with the most comprehensive product page UX database in the world with 285 manually reviewed pages, more than 1,700 screenshots, and 4,100+ categorized implementation examples of the 95 product page usability guidelines presented in the 12 reports.
When you purchase the product page usability study you get full access to this benchmark database.
Furthermore the benchmark database includes tools that allow you to review your own (or your clients’) product page UX and see how it stacks up against the competition.
“Excellent tool – looking forward to using it with our other sites and prototypes as they’re developed.”
Get instant access to the 12 product page UX reports (along with 60 other e-commerce UX research reports) and the full benchmark database with Baymard Premium access.
Refund policy: We stand by our research and offer you a full 14 days “no questions asked” refund. If you’re not satisfied, simply e-mail us at christian@baymard.com for a full refund.
“Baymard's training provides the proper language and sound evidence to understand what it mean to create a truly usable interface in the ecommerce business.”
“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.”
“My team loves Baymard Premium and it has become a valuable tool for us. We consult with a number of large brands and manage their eComm (both DTC and eRetail) and your data is amazing, it gives us all the testing data without having to run the tests ourselves. Our clients appreciate us having the depth of knowledge Baymard provides, we've used Baymard data multiple times to defend our recommendations and to inform our designs.”
“I’m an avid user of your reports and recommendations. I have leveraged your articles and findings for my previous B2B work at Grainger, B2C work at Ulta, and now I’m at Hyatt. Thanks”
“Truly a great learning experience about almost every aspect of eCommerce and the steps you need to take to improve the shopping experience for your users. Everyone working with eCommerce should attend this course. Absolutely worth the investment!”