Ecommerce UX: where online stores lose customers

Ecommerce UX isn't one thing to fix — it's three different places along the purchase journey where a customer can back out before paying: search and filters, the product page, and the cart with checkout. Mobile isn't a fourth item on that list. It's the context in which the customer moves through each of the three stages — with its own touch- and small-screen-specific traps at every one of them.

This article shows the scale of the problem at each stage using Baymard Institute's public benchmarks, separates two measurements of device use that answer different questions, covers the digital accessibility obligation that applies to e-commerce services in Poland, and leads into four articles in the UX/UI section that each develop one of these topics in depth.

Ecommerce UX in three places: search, product page, checkout

Search and filters. Baymard Institute tested the usability of on-site search across "19 leading e-commerce sites across 8 different verticals" and, during that testing, logged "more than 700 search-specific usability issues." From those findings the institute built 31 e-commerce search guidelines, and used them to benchmark "344 leading US and European e-commerce sites" (baymard.com/research/ecommerce-search, read 5 October 2026). For product listings and filters — a separate study by the same institute, with its own methodology — as many as "36% of sites" had design or functional flaws serious enough that Baymard calls them "downright harmful" to usability (baymard.com/research/ecommerce-product-lists, read 1 October 2026). On mobile, this stage adds its own traps: search suggestions can't hide behind the on-screen keyboard, and filters need to open and close with one thumb, without scrolling the whole page to find an apply button.

Product page. The same institute rated product-page usability across 344 stores and found that "49%" have product-page UX rated "decent" or "good," while "51%" come in as "mediocre" or worse (baymard.com/research/product-page, read 5 October 2026). A separate article in this section — product page — goes into what actually separates a good product page from a weak one: photos, price, availability and the legally required information. On mobile, the product page also has to fit a swipeable image gallery, and the add-to-cart button needs to stay visible without scrolling through the whole description.

Cart and checkout. In Baymard's checkout benchmark, "65% of sites have a performance of 'mediocre' or worse," "35% of sites feature a 'decent' or better checkout flow," and only "2% are 'good'" — none of the 344 sites scored reached "perfect" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability, read 5 October 2026). This stage has its own in-depth article in this section — cart abandonment — because it's where the effects of mistakes from the two earlier stages pile up: a customer who has already made it through search and the product page drops out right at the last step.

Mobile as the context for every stage, not a fourth stage

Device share and the device a purchase is actually completed on answer two different questions, and shouldn't be mixed together. StatCounter measures device share across all page views in its panel — not in a specific shopping category, not on a specific store. For Poland, in September 2026: desktop 56.07%, mobile 43.31%, tablet 0.62% (gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/poland, read 1 October 2026). This is page-view-weighted data from one provider's panel, not a census of every visit made in Poland.

Gemius, in its 2026 survey (CAWI, 14–22 July 2026), asked about something different: not what people browse on, but what they complete a purchase on. 58% of surveyed buyers finish their purchases on a phone, 44% of them in an app, and 35% on a computer. These are shares of the group of buyers, not shares of site traffic. If you put the two numbers side by side in the same material, describe them as two separate measurements, not the same reality seen from two sides.

Digital accessibility for online stores — an obligation since 28 June 2025

Directive (EU) 2019/882 (the European Accessibility Act, EAA) explicitly covers "e-commerce" services within its scope. The dates are set by the directive itself and are the same everywhere: member states had to transpose it by 28 June 2022 and apply the national rules from 28 June 2025 (Art. 31). Poland implemented it with the Act on ensuring compliance with accessibility requirements for certain products and services by economic operators (Journal of Laws 2024, item 731), which entered into force on 28 June 2025 and covers services provided to consumers (Art. 3(2)). If you sell online to consumers anywhere in the EU, the obligation has therefore applied since mid-2025: the directive covers services provided to consumers after 28 June 2025 (Art. 2(2)), subject to the transitional measures in Art. 32 — for example, service contracts agreed before that date may continue unchanged until they expire, but for no longer than five years. What the directive leaves to each member state is who supervises compliance and what the penalty is — and in Poland those two points are answered by the national act, as set out below.

There's one exception worth knowing and getting right: the directive exempts micro-enterprises providing services — companies with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance-sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million (Art. 4(5), with the definition in Art. 3(23)). The exemption applies only to services — micro-enterprises dealing in products get lighter obligations, not an exemption. The Polish act excludes services provided by micro-enterprises (Art. 4(1)), but does not itself define a micro-enterprise, so the general definition from the Entrepreneurs' Law (Prawo przedsiębiorców) has to be used.

Two things regularly circulate in a wrong version. First: the supervisory authority for e-commerce services is not the consumer protection office (UOKiK) but the minister responsible for digitalisation (Art. 38(3)(2)). The President of the Management Board of the State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled Persons (Państwowy Fundusz Rehabilitacji Osób Niepełnosprawnych, PFRON) monitors the whole market surveillance system (Art. 39) and, alongside the competent supervisory authority, can impose penalties (Art. 73(3)). Second: the penalty is not a fixed amount in złoty. The act allows a penalty of up to ten times the average monthly wage in the national economy for the previous year (announced by the President of GUS), but no more than 10% of turnover in the financial year preceding the penalty (Art. 73(1)). An article that gives one rigid penalty figure from this act is therefore inaccurate. It is also a different sanction from the penalty of “up to PLN 500,000” in the act implementing the GPSR — these amounts must not be confused.

The directive itself doesn't name WCAG or the EN 301 549 standard — it refers to a "harmonised standard" in general terms. In practice, the industry reference point is WCAG 2.2, published by the W3C as a Recommendation on 5 October 2023 (updated 12 December 2024). Compatibility runs one way only: content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to 2.1, but not the other way round. WCAG 2.2 adds new success criteria — at level AA, for example, Target Size (Minimum), Focus Not Obscured (Minimum), Dragging Movements and Accessible Authentication (Minimum) — so a store built to WCAG 2.1 AA needs to be checked against those (w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/new-in-22, read 1 October 2026).

Regardless of the legal obligation, the basics of accessibility — sufficient contrast, large clickable areas, markup a screen reader can parse — simply make a site easier to use for everyone, not only for the people the law is meant to protect. That's a usability argument, not just a compliance one.

Speed is UX too

A slow-loading product page or a checkout that hangs is UX, not just a ranking factor. One terminology change worth knowing: First Input Delay (FID), still mentioned in older guides, stopped being a Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024 — replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP), a metric that measures the responsiveness of a whole interaction, not just the first click (web.dev/blog/inp-cwv-launch, read 1 October 2026). How to measure and improve store speed — LCP, INP and CLS, together with the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console — is covered separately in our article on Core Web Vitals for ecommerce.

A few dates from other areas have also changed what a store has to meet. Since 13 December 2024, the EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) has applied, setting the product information an online offer must carry (Regulation (EU) 2023/988, Art. 52, read 5 October 2026). And from 31 January 2027, Merchant Center will start enforcing a minimum product image size of 500 × 500 pixels (product data specification).

Map of the UX/UI section

This article is the entry point to four articles that each develop one of these stages in depth:

• Cart abandonment — why customers back out at the cart and checkout, what Baymard's data says, how to measure it in GA4.
• Product page — what a product page needs to cover to satisfy the customer, the law and Google.
• Site search — how to read data from on-site search and filters, what customers are searching for and not finding.
• Ecommerce website design — a ready-made template or a custom-built store, homepage and navigation structure.

For a self-guided audit of your own store, use the UX store checklist — it walks through every stage in this article as a concrete checklist.

Where to start — 5 steps

1. Walk the whole purchase journey on mobile — from search, through the product page, to checkout — and note every point where you hesitated.
2. Check whether your store's search and filters actually lead to a product, rather than to a no-results page.
3. Evaluate the product page from the customer's point of view: check that they can see the price, availability, delivery cost and everything the law requires before they have to click through to the next step.
4. Measure checkout — the number of steps, the number of form fields, and whether the total cost is visible before the last step.
5. Check the accessibility basics (contrast, keyboard navigation, image descriptions), and check whether the services micro-enterprise exemption actually applies to you before assuming you're covered by it.