Research Topic

Mobile E-Commerce UX

How do you design a user-friendly shopping experience for a 5-6 inch screen?

Mobile traffic has soared in recent years and now often constitutes 50% of all traffic on many e-commerce sites. However, it’s not uncommon for mobile e-commerce sites to still have a significantly poorer conversion rate than their desktop counterpart – in some cases converting less than half as many visitors into customers.

At Baymard we’d conducted the world’s most comprehensive research study of mobile e-commerce UX - spanning more than 20,000 hours only testing mobile user behavior. This mobile usability study examines how the touch interface, the small screen, and users’ mobile behavior introduce a whole host of pitfalls to watch out for when designing and running a mobile e-commerce site.

Despite testing the mobile sites of 50+ of the largest e-commerce players in the world, the test subjects encountered a staggering 3,600+ mobile-related usability issues during the test sessions. These usability issues have been analyzed and distilled into 340+ mobile UX guidelines on how to best design and structure a high-performing mobile e-commerce site, as well as documenting how end-users perceive and interact with mobile sites in a shopping context.

This page provides you an overview of our research specific to Mobile E-commerce UX. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.

The Current Mobile E-Commerce UX Performance

Based on the findings from the qualitative usability research study we’ve also benchmarked the full mobile user experience of 93 of the largest US and European mobile sites. This provides you with 9,000+ worst- and best-practice mobile UX examples, and 12,300+ mobile UX performance scores.

The UX benchmark of the 93 major mobile e-commerce sites provides a clear picture of the general state of mobile e-commerce performance, and identifies common design flaws as well as strategic oversights and opportunities.

The Mobile E-Commerce UX performance for the average top-grossing US and European e-commerce site is “mediocre”, with none of the mobile sites benchmarked having a “decent” or “good” UX implementation and performance. This leaves nearly all sites in a tight cluster of 52% “mediocre” (or worse), and 48% “acceptable”. That said, while there aren’t any standout performances, there are also very few “poor” or outright broken experiences.

In comparison, in most of the other e-commerce UX studies we’ve conducted at Baymard Institute the average UX performance also amounts to “mediocre”, but also tends to have a wider spread of variation and performance scores.

This benchmark dataset thus shows that there’s ample room for improvements when looking within the specific topics of the mobile user experience — in particularly the UX within Mobile Homepage, Mobile Main Navigation & Categories, Mobile On-Site Search, Mobile Forms, and Mobile Sitewide Features & Elements. These topics carry issues for many sites, and also include some “missed opportunities” for the e-commerce industry as a whole. Also, note that this is an analysis of the average performance across 214 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites. When analyzing a specific site there’s nearly always a handful of critical UX issues along with a larger collection of worthwhile improvements — this is the case even when we conduct UX audits for Fortune 500 companies.

In Baymard Premium we provide an in-depth walkthrough of the UX performance and competitive landscape within the 31 topics of Mobile E-Commerce UX, along with “missed opportunities” to be extra alert to.

Lastly, and most importantly, it’s worthwhile mentioning that the mobile platform is truly difficult to design for – the lack of screen real estate causes a dramatic loss of page overview for users (as described in this article). As a result, most of the best-performing solutions and patterns, including those identified in this study, are, in the end, still a compromise. They provide the best attainable results and mobile UX given the limitations of the mobile platform.

This is a sub-set of the full benchmark which includes 214 e-commerce sites.
View our full UX benchmark

949 Categorized Mobile Design Examples

FREE RESEARCH CONTENT

Explore design patterns across 949 page examples of mobile designs and features from leading e-commerce sites, all annotated and organized into 17 different page types. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own mobile design, and to get a feel for emerging trends in Mobile e-commerce .

Homepage
57 Examples

Navigation Menu
139 Examples

Category Page
35 Examples

Product List
57 Examples

Filtering Options
30 Examples

Search Field
60 Examples

Search Autocomplete
56 Examples

Search Results
59 Examples

Product Page
57 Examples

Cart
57 Examples

Checkout Account Selection
51 Examples

Shipping Address
59 Examples

Shipping Method
64 Examples

Billing Address
9 Examples

Payment Method
62 Examples

Review Order
39 Examples

Order Confirmation
58 Examples

Browse all design examples

77 Research Articles on Mobile E-commerce UX

FREE RESEARCH CONTENT

We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on Mobile UX for free in these 77 mobile articles:

Payment Method UX: Designing Payment Selection
September 5, 2023
Popular
Make All Color Swatches Available in Mobile List Items for Visually Driven Product Types (57% Don’t)
August 8, 2023
Include All Order-Fulfillment Options in the Fulfillment-Selector Interface (50% Don’t)
July 6, 2023
The Current State of Homepage and Category Navigation UX (12 Common Pitfalls)
June 21, 2023

See all 77 mobile UX articles

31 Research Reports on Mobile UX

PAID RESEARCH CONTENT

All 340+ mobile UX research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 31 topics (2,020 pages of research findings in total):