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The Current State of E-Commerce Product Discovery UX: 8 Common Pitfalls & Best Practices

September 17, 2025 12:45 PM
Power Talk
🇬🇧 English
Wisła

About

This presentation dives into what's really happening in e-commerce product discovery today, with hard data on how sites perform across homepage, search, product listings, and product detail pages. The talk will share surprising gaps uncovered, opportunities most retailers are missing, and practical improvements you can implement tomorrow. All insights come from Baymard's rigorous research, giving you the tools to streamline your shopping experience and stay ahead of competitors.

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Talk by

Photo of Rinaldo Ugrina, Product Manager at Baymard Institute
Rinaldo Ugrina
Product Manager at Baymard Institute

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Talk in brief

In this presentation from WaysConf 2025, Rinaldo Ugrina, Product Manager at the Baymard Institute, shares critical insights from a massive usability study on e-commerce product discovery. Based on over 5,500 hours of research and benchmarking across 180 major e-commerce sites, Ugrina outlines common UX pitfalls that cause users to abandon their shopping journeys. The talk focuses on three core areas: homepage and category navigation, on-site search, and product list layouts. Ugrina explains how simple design adjustments, such as displaying at least 40% of product types on the homepage, persisting search queries in the input field, and replacing endless scrolling with a 'load more' button, can dramatically reduce user friction. By implementing structured navigation rules and clear applied filter overviews, product teams can prevent cognitive overload, keep users engaged, and recover lost revenue caused by poor product findability.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    Showcase Product Diversity Early

    To prevent users from underestimating what an e-commerce site sells, homepages should feature at least 40% of the available top-level product types. On mobile devices, this can be achieved compactly by using top-level navigational text links.

    Watch from 6:37
  2. 02

    Use Explicit Copy for Curated Links

    Homepage links promoting curated collections or narrow scopes must clearly spell out their exact destination in the button text itself rather than relying on nearby context. This prevents scanning users from entering narrow categories by mistake and feeling disappointed.

    Watch from 8:09
  3. 03

    Apply the 14-15-10 Rule to Navigation

    To avoid overwhelming users, main navigation menus should contain no more than 14 top-level categories, with each parent category containing a maximum of 15 subcategories. Additionally, every subcategory must contain at least 10 products to avoid frustrating users with near-empty sections.

    Watch from 10:10
  4. 04

    Retain Search Queries in the Input Field

    E-commerce sites should persist the user's search query in the search bar after results load rather than clearing it. This allows users to easily refine their search terms instead of being forced to retype their entire query from scratch.

    Watch from 13:38
  5. 05

    Replace Endless Scrolling with Load More

    Endless scrolling often exhausts users and deprives them of natural stopping points to pause and refine their search. Implementing a 'load more' button that loads 15 to 30 items per batch strikes a better balance and reduces cognitive load.

    Watch from 19:36
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Impact of Homepage Visuals on Site Perception

When users land on an e-commerce homepage, they immediately try to determine what products are available based on the visible content and navigation. On mobile devices, where main navigation menus are hidden by default, up to 70% of users scroll through the entire homepage just to understand the site's identity and product range. If the homepage content is too narrow or fails to represent the catalog accurately, users will misinterpret or underestimate what the store actually sells. Testing showed that displaying at least 40% of top-level product types on the homepage, or using compact navigational text links on mobile, successfully communicates product diversity.

Watch from 4:00

Preventing Navigation Overwhelm in Main Menus

Main navigation menus introduce users to how a site's products are organized, but overcategorization frequently leads to severe usability issues. When users are presented with more than 15 options to evaluate at once, they quickly become overwhelmed and struggle to make a decision. Furthermore, creating too many highly specific subcategories often results in sections that contain only a handful of items, which frustrates users who expect a robust selection. To maintain a clean and usable hierarchy, sites should limit top-level navigation to 14 main categories, restrict parent categories to 15 subcategories, and ensure every subcategory contains at least 10 products.

Watch from 9:08

Reducing Friction by Persisting Search Inputs

Users frequently need to modify their search terms when they are unsatisfied with the initial results. However, more than half of the e-commerce sites benchmarked by Baymard clear the search input field as soon as the results page loads or when the user taps back into the search box. This design pattern forces users to retype their entire query from scratch, introducing unnecessary friction at a moment when they are already experiencing frustration. Retaining the search query in the input field allows users to easily edit or append terms, significantly reducing the interaction cost of finding products.

Watch from 12:46

The Usability Pitfalls of Endless Scrolling

While endless scrolling appears seamless, usability testing reveals it is the worst-performing method for loading more products. It quickly exhausts users by presenting an ever-growing list of items without any natural stopping points where they can pause, reflect, or refine their search parameters. On mobile devices, this issue is compounded by limited viewports, making it difficult for users to track how many items have loaded. Replacing endless scrolling with a 'load more' button gives users control over their browsing experience, allowing them to load products in manageable batches of 15 to 30 items.

Watch from 18:31

Improving Transparency with Applied Filter Overviews

When users apply filters to narrow down a product list, many sites only indicate the selection with a checkbox inside the filtering menu. This forces users to repeatedly reopen the filter panel, scroll through long lists, and mentally track their selections just to verify what parameters are active. To make filtering transparent and easy to manage, sites should display an overview of all applied filters at the top of the product list. This overview not only confirms the active criteria but also provides a quick, single-tap mechanism for users to dismiss individual filters without reopening the main panel.

Watch from 20:16
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