Baymard
Information
- Platform
- Cost
- $200/mo Foundation; $350/mo Expansion; from $700/mo Custom - all billed annually only ($2,400 / $4,200 / $8,400+ per year)
Other Info
FreeYes
About Baymard
Baymard Institute is a UX research company focused on ecommerce. Its main product is a subscription to a research library of more than 700 UX guidelines and 18,000+ design examples, based on over 200,000 hours of usability research across 35+ ecommerce industries.
Subscriptions also include UX-Ray, an automated scanner that reviews key parts of a store against Baymard's guidelines and groups findings by severity, plus UX-Query, an AI assistant that answers design questions from the research. There is a Figma plugin, competitor benchmarking and training with three certification levels.
Separately, Baymard sells expert-led audits: full-site, flow-specific, competitor and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility audits, priced per engagement. It is a research service more than a self-serve audit tool.
Best for: Ecommerce teams who want research-backed guidelines and benchmarks to base design decisions on.
Strengths
- Large, ecommerce-specific guideline library with design examples.
- Benchmark data comparing UX performance across hundreds of ecommerce sites.
- Automated UX-Ray scan included in subscriptions.
- Expert audit service available, including WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility audits.
Limitations
- Paid plans start at $2,400 a year, shown as annual prices.
- Focused on ecommerce; less useful for SaaS or content sites.
- Expert audits are quote-only.
Pricing
Foundation is $2,400 a year ($200 a month) and Expansion $4,200 a year ($350 a month), each with 3 users and $20 a month per extra user. Custom starts at $8,400 a year ($700 a month) and adds expert consultations and SSO. A free plan gives access to a limited set of guidelines and page design examples. Expert audits are priced separately. Checked October 2026.
When to pick something else
- UXAudit.Now: pick it if you want a cheaper self-serve audit against a guideline library
- VertaaUX: pick it if you need automated UX and accessibility checks on any site type
- Hotjar: pick it if you want behaviour data from your own visitors
Checked against Baymard’s own website in October 2026.
What Baymard's research says
Most people meet Baymard through a statistic. The research behind those numbers is large-scale, moderated usability testing of real ecommerce sites, written up as guidelines. These are the findings worth knowing even if you never subscribe, each linked to Baymard's own summary page (read 4 October 2026).
Cart abandonment: 70% is the baseline, not a crisis
Baymard's cart abandonment statistics average 50 separate studies into a documented abandonment rate of 70.22%. Much of that is unavoidable: in Baymard's own survey, 42% of US online shoppers had abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing / not ready to buy”. Leave those out and the reasons that remain are fixable. 40% left because extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) were too high, 20% because delivery was too slow and 19% because they did not trust the site with their card details.
The practical lesson is to show the full price early and earn trust at the moment of payment. Our guides to formatting currency and phone number fields cover two small places where checkouts lose that trust.
Checkout: fewer fields matter more than fewer steps
Baymard's cart and checkout research is its best-known body of work. In its article on minimising checkout form fields (June 2024), the average checkout was 5.1 steps long with 11.3 form fields, and 17% of users had abandoned an order because the checkout was too long or complicated. Baymard's point is that the number of fields and their difficulty hurt more than the number of steps.
Baymard also estimates that the average large ecommerce site could gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design alone. Field-level details carry much of that: mark required and optional fields clearly, write error messages that say how to fix the problem, avoid disabling the submit button without explanation, and do not make people type a password twice or guess password rules to create an account mid-purchase.
Search and product lists
For ecommerce search, Baymard tested 19 leading sites across 8 verticals and logged more than 700 search-specific usability issues, distilled into 31 guidelines. More than half of them are simple design and interaction changes to the search field, autocomplete and results, not search-engine logic. The product lists and filtering study used the same design, found more than 700 issues with lists, filtering and sorting, and turned them into 83 guidelines.
If you are deciding how much to lean on each, our post on search vs filter covers the trade-off, and dropdown vs radio buttons vs checkboxes helps with the filter controls themselves.
Mobile ecommerce
Accessibility and benchmarking
The accessibility research translates WCAG 2.1 AA into guidelines for the page types and controls that ecommerce sites actually use, which is more practical than reading the standard on its own. Baymard's UX benchmark ranks 344 top ecommerce sites using more than 275,000 UX performance scores, and is useful for seeing how a competitor handles the same flow.
Baymard also writes about readability: our post on font size and line height draws on its line-length research.
How to use it without a subscription
Many findings are summarised for free in Baymard's articles and statistics pages, and the free plan includes a limited set of guidelines. For a quick, rules-based first pass on your own site, run our free UX audit; for paid options, including Baymard's UX-Ray scanner, see our comparison of AI website audit tools.
