{"id":1779,"slug":"baymard-list-usability-67-90-vs-17-33-abandonment-2015","title":"Baymard Institute (2015) — sites with mediocre product list usability saw 67-90% abandonment vs 17-33% for sites with even a slightly optimised toolset","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","smb-owner","candid-team"],"topics":["forms-conversion","customer-facing-tools","faceted-search"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Baymard Institute's benchmark of 50 top-grossing US e-commerce sites found: \"During the test sessions, sites with mediocre product list usability saw abandonment rates of **67-90%** while sites with even just a slightly optimized toolset saw just **17-33% abandonments** for the very same product finding tasks.\"\n\n**Source:** Baymard Institute, \"E-Commerce Product List Usability: Report & Benchmark,\" published March 3, 2015.\n\n**Confidence:** Verified — primary, independent research body.\n\n**Caveat:** ~11 years old (as of June 2026) and specific to e-commerce product lists; directionally relevant to any large catalogue but not a universal figure. This is the *only* clean, vendor-independent magnitude figure in the brief.\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** The single strongest independent magnitude citation. Use as the headline \"the payoff is real\" data point, always with the age + scope caveat. Anchors [[rule-build-catalogue-when-records-numerous-changing-multi-attribute]] and [[rule-self-service-fails-on-findability-deliver-via-structured-records]].","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"research-brief-searchable-structured-catalogue-working-tool-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the searchable, structured catalogue as a working tool — when records-not-prose pays off (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"nngroup-faceted-search-refinement-definition","title":"Nielsen Norman Group — faceted search refines a large content set; controls + results displayed simultaneously","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"gartner-43-percent-findability-failure-2024","title":"Gartner / Eric Keller — single most common self-service failure mode is inability to find relevant content; appears in >43% of cases","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-build-catalogue-when-records-numerous-changing-multi-attribute","title":"R1 — Build a searchable, structured catalogue when records are numerous, change often, or carry several independent queryable attributes","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-searchable-structured-catalogue-working-tool-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the searchable, structured catalogue as a working tool — when records-not-prose pays off (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"caveats-searchable-catalogue-no-isolated-study-vendor-skip-thresholds","title":"Caveats for the searchable-catalogue brief: no study isolates catalogues as a variable; vendor-sourced skip thresholds; Baymard age; AI-eligibility under-sourced","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"quarantine-vendor-faceted-search-adoption-percentages","title":"QUARANTINE — \"60% of websites do not use facets and filters\" / \"only 10% of e-commerce sites use faceted sorting\"","kind":"research-notes","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rule-build-catalogue-when-records-numerous-changing-multi-attribute","title":"R1 — Build a searchable, structured catalogue when records are numerous, change often, or carry several independent queryable attributes","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"rule-quarantine-vendor-ctr-multipliers","title":"R6 — Quarantine vendor CTR / AI-citation multipliers; the only clean primary figure (Nestlé 82%) is single-company and ring-fenced","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:12.685Z","updated_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:12.685Z"}