6 Ways to Improve the Relevance of Cross-Sells in the Cart (52% of Desktop Sites Don’t Do Enough)
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Research Topic
Cart & Checkout UX
69% of all e-commerce visitors abandon their shopping cart. Why?
At Baymard we’ve tracked the global average cart abandonment rate for 11 years, and it currently sits at 69.2%
After e-commerce sites have invested vast resources in “first in mind” strategies, Pay Per Click campaigns, beautifully crafted homepage imagery, perfect category taxonomies, faceted search logic, etc., it seems almost unbearable that 69% of users – after having added items to their cart – then choose to abandon their purchase.
Why is it that this many orders are abandoned? And what exactly can online retailers do to improve this sad state of affairs? That’s exactly what we wanted to find out.
At Baymard Institute, we started researching checkout usability more than 11 years ago when we founded the institute and did our first round of large-scale usability testing. Ever since, we’ve tested and re-tested checkout usability, running large-scale qualitative research studies testing the checkout flows of the world’s leading e-commerce sites, as well as conducting checkout UX audits for more than 100 leading e-commerce sites.
This page provides you an overview of the results from those years of testing checkout flows with real end-users. All of this research is available as part of Baymard Premium.
The Current Checkout UX Performance
During all 11 years of usability testing we have consistently found the design and flow of the checkout to frequently be the sole cause for users abandoning their purchase during the checkout flow. Either because users become so infuriated that they leave in anger, or because they don’t know how to complete one or more fields, and thus have no other option but to leave.
Benchmark UX Performances
Poor
Mediocre
Acceptable
Decent
Good
Cart & Checkout
131 Guidelines
Shopping Cart & “Added to Cart” Behavior
10 Guidelines
Account Selection & Creation
9 Guidelines
Customer & Address Information
12 Guidelines
Gifting Flow & Features
5 Guidelines
Shipping & Store Pickup
11 Guidelines
Payment Flow & Methods (Incl. Third-Party)
8 Guidelines
Credit Card Form
10 Guidelines
Order Review
5 Guidelines
Order Confirmation & E-Mail
4 Guidelines
Form & Page Design
10 Guidelines
User Interactions & Distractions
10 Guidelines
Cross-Sells
4 Guidelines
Validation Errors & Data Persistence
10 Guidelines
Field Labels & Microcopy
7 Guidelines
Field Design & Features
8 Guidelines
Default Values & Autocompletion
8 Guidelines
To accompany the usability test sessions we’ve also benchmarked the checkout flows of 60 top grossing US and EU e-commerce sites across all 134 guidelines, each on a 7 point weighted scale. This has resulted in a benchmark database with 7,800 checkout elements manually reviewed and scored, across 440 different checkout steps.
When looking at the general state of checkout usability, the average performance is “mediocre”. The average site has 39 unique improvements to perform in their checkout flow, to gain the 35.26% increase in conversion rate our combined usability test sessions show that the average large-scale e-commerce site can potentially improve through better checkout UX. However, the nuances and diversities behind the overall mediocre performance are manyfold.
Explore the current checkout UX performance:
525 Categorized Checkout Step Designs
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Explore design patterns across 525 examples of checkout step designs and features, all annotated and organized into 12 different page types. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own checkout flow, and to get a feel for emerging trends in checkout design.
Shipping Address
115 Examples
Delivery & Shipping Methods
114 Examples
Address Validator
65 Examples
56 Articles on Checkout UX
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
We’ve released a small subset of the Premium research finding on Checkout UX and form field usability for free in these articles:
3 Checkout Resource Pages
FREE RESEARCH CONTENT
Beyond the extensive set or articles, benchmark database, and Premium research we have on checkout UX, we’ve also gathered three resources that are related to checkout UX that you may want to explore:
Country selector
A free auto-complete plugin for country selection.
Abandonment stats
A reference list of 41 cart abandonment statistics along with a reasons for checkout abandonments survey (lower on the page).
Card number patterns
A reference table of numerous different credit card patterns, outlining the IIN-range and spacing-schema.
17 Research Reports on Checkout UX
PAID RESEARCH CONTENT
All 134 checkout research findings are available as part of Baymard Premium, and are divided into the following 17 topics (611 pages of research findings in total):
Subscribe to Baymard Premium to access all of our Cart & Checkout UX research
Get full access to all our Cart & Checkout UX research reports, benchmarks, and page designs previewed here, along with our complete 700+ guidelines for Homepage & Category Navigation, Search, Product Listing, Product Details Page, Accounts & Self-Service, and Mobile E-Commerce. Utilize our 54,000+ hours of UX research to improve your Cart & Checkout user experience and to document your UX decisions.
Test Methodology
This research on Checkout UX is part of Baymard Institute’s full 54,000+ hours of large scale research catalog, which is based on:
- Usability Testing: 8 rounds of qualitative usability testing with 1,200+ test subject/site sessions following the "Think Aloud" protocol (in-person 1:1 moderated lab usability testing).
- 12 rounds of manual benchmarking of the world’s 60 top-grossing e-commerce sites across all 700+ UX guidelines across (34,900+ implementation examples and 57,100+ UX performance scores).
- In-lab eye-tracking testing.
- 8 quantitative studies with a total of 10,721 participants.
Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.
UX Audit Service
GET YOUR CHECKOUT PROCESS REVIEWED
What are the 20 most important changes you can make to your checkout process?
We will put together a 40-page report of the 20 most important usability improvements you can make to your checkout process.
