Baymard Institute (2015) — sites with mediocre product list usability saw 67-90% abandonment vs 17-33% for sites with even a slightly optimised toolset

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."

Source: Baymard Institute, "E-Commerce Product List Usability: Report & Benchmark," published March 3, 2015.

Confidence: Verified — primary, independent research body.

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.

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 R1 — Build a searchable, structured catalogue when records are numerous, change often, or carry several independent queryable attributes and R5 — Self-service most often fails on findability; deliver self-service via structured, queryable records, not un-queryable documents.