---
title: Baymard Institute — what it is | RGM® Glossary
url: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/baymard-institute/
updated: 2026-06-10
source_html: https://realgrowthmatters.com/glossary/baymard-institute/
---

# Baymard Institute

proper noun

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

Baymard benchmark · phrase

Its research-backed UX standard.

"Our checkout fails four **Baymard benchmarks** — start with forced account creation."

## 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.

**Worked example.** A DTC store converts at 1.1% with rising ad spend. The Baymard audit finds the classics — shipping costs revealed at the last step, forced account creation, a 14-field address form. The fixes follow the research's severity order: costs shown on the cart page, guest checkout default, address autocomplete. Conversion climbs past 1.8% in six weeks — worth more than the quarter's entire ad-budget increase, for the cost of reading the studies someone already ran.

**Failure modes to watch.** Copying guidelines into contexts the research didn't test; citing the 70% abandonment average as YOUR problem without measuring your own funnel's reasons; and treating the benchmark scores of giant retailers as targets for a five-person shop.

## Synonyms & antonyms

### Synonyms

Baymard InstituteBaymard

## 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](https://baymard.com/about).

## Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

[View interest-over-time on Google Trends →](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=baymard%20institute&date=today%205-y)

## 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

- tool[Experiment planner](/tools/experiment-planner/)
- tool[Funnel drop-off analyzer](/tools/funnel-drop-off-analyzer/)

## 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

- module[CRO & experimentation](/training/cro-experimentation/)

## Disciplines

Areas of marketing where baymard institute is a core concern:

[Analytics](/training/marketing-analytics/)[Growth strategy](/training/growth-marketing-foundations/)

## Read next

## Related terms

[Cart abandonment](/glossary/cart-abandonment/)[Conversion rate](/glossary/conversion-rate/)[Customer onboarding](/glossary/customer-onboarding/)[Nielsen Norman Group](/glossary/nielsen-norman-group/)[A/B test](/glossary/ab-test/)

## Sources

1. trends[Google Trends — "baymard institute"](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=baymard%20institute&date=today%205-y)