Baymard Institute
Every 'average cart abandonment is ~70%' slide traces to one Copenhagen lab that actually counted.
- Founded
- 2009, Copenhagen
- Method
- Large-scale moderated usability testing
- Famous stat
- ~70% average cart abandonment
- Library
- Thousands of UX guidelines, page-type by page-type
Forms & parts of speech
What it is
Baymard Institute is the independent Copenhagen research lab (founded 2009) that runs the web's largest sustained e-commerce UX research program — tens of thousands of hours of moderated usability testing across checkout, product pages, search, navigation, and mobile, distilled into a guideline library and page-type benchmarks of major retailers. Its meta-analysis of cart-abandonment studies — averaging around 70% — became the industry's most-cited statistic.
Why marketers rely on it
It replaced taste with evidence in e-commerce design arguments: each guideline traces to observed user behavior in testing, and the benchmark database shows how leading sites score against the same criteria. For CRO teams it functions as a pre-built hypothesis library — the documented usability issues ARE the test backlog, ranked by observed severity.
How to use it well
Audit your funnel against the checkout guidelines before buying traffic (fixing a leak beats filling a bucket), mine the abandonment-reasons research for which fixes matter (extra costs and forced accounts lead), and use the free article layer before subscribing. Remember the context: findings generalize best to e-commerce; SaaS signups rhyme but aren't identical.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Origin & history
Founded in Copenhagen in 2009 by researchers Christian Holst and Jamie Appleseed, who began publishing moderated checkout-usability findings when e-commerce design ran on opinion; the name comes from the founders' street, Baymardvej — a research lab named like a law firm, by accident.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- What is the Baymard Institute?
- An independent Copenhagen UX research lab (founded 2009) running the largest sustained e-commerce usability research program.
- What is Baymard famous for?
- The ~70% average cart-abandonment benchmark and evidence-based checkout/product-page UX guidelines.
- How do teams use Baymard?
- As a pre-built CRO hypothesis library — audit funnels against its guidelines, prioritize by its observed severity data.
Related tools & calculators
Resources & people to follow
- referenceBaymard.com — guidelines + benchmarks
- referenceIts cart-abandonment meta-analysis
- referenceNielsen Norman Group — the general-UX complement
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
- moduleCRO & experimentation
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where baymard institute is a core concern: