ACT II · Trust
What Baymard Institute's Research Says About Why People Abandon Websites
200,000+ hours of UX research, and the reasons people leave are more fixable than most business owners assume.
Baymard Institute has spent over 200,000 hours studying ecommerce UX, testing against 275,000+ manually scored UX performance benchmarks and observing real users on hundreds of live sites. Their research on why people abandon websites — not just carts, but the whole experience — is some of the most rigorously tested UX data available, and it's used by 71% of Fortune 500 ecommerce companies.
The headline abandonment numbers
Baymard's aggregated research puts average cart abandonment at 70.22%, based on data across 50 different studies. Separately, their research found 17% of online shoppers report abandoning an order specifically because the checkout process was too difficult — a purely UX-driven loss, unrelated to price or product.
70.22%
average cart abandonment rate across studies
17%
abandon specifically due to a difficult checkout process
Where the failures actually concentrate
Baymard's broader performance benchmarking found that up to 67% of leading US and European sites have "mediocre" to "poor" homepage and category navigation, and up to 62% have mediocre or worse product page UX — even among large, well-resourced companies. This matters for smaller businesses too: if sites with real budgets are still getting the basics wrong at this rate, the more common failure mode isn't a lack of investment — it's a lack of attention to the specific, testable details that actually drive abandonment.
The good news buried in this research
Baymard's own analysis found that the average large ecommerce site could improve conversion by 35.26% purely by redesigning its checkout process — not by changing price, product, or marketing. That's a striking number: a large share of lost customers aren't lost because they didn't want what was on offer. They're lost to friction that has nothing to do with the product itself.
The pattern across Baymard's research is consistent: abandonment is disproportionately a UX and friction problem, not a demand problem. Businesses that assume low conversion means "people don't want this" are often missing a simpler, more fixable explanation.
What to actually check on your own site
- ■How many steps does it take to go from "interested" to "done" — every extra step is a chance to lose someone
- ■Is navigation genuinely clear, not just present — Baymard's data suggests this is where most sites, even large ones, fall short
- ■Does checkout (or your equivalent contact/enquiry flow) ask for anything it doesn't actually need yet
Don't let friction cost you customers who already wanted in
Every TFLYX Commerce build is designed around exactly this research — fewer steps, clearer paths.
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