What’s this? Here you’ll find 188 annotated “Sorting Tool” design examples from Baymard’s UX benchmark of 93 major e-commerce sites. (Note: this is less than 1% of the full research catalog.)
Solid sorting features enable users to order products by the attributes they care about — something that can dramatically speed up the user’s product-exploration and -selection process.
More ‘Sorting Tool’ Insights
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Our testing shows that sorting is a generally under-prioritized area of e-commerce that has remained largely unchanged for the past 10–15 years (the entire history of modern e-commerce), with little-to-no innovation. In fact, some sites have started removing sorting features from their product lists altogether in a misguided attempt at simplification. This trend and general stagnation stands in sharp contrast to how important sorting features are to users.
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During usability testing sorting proved to be a crucial part of the users’ product-finding process. Sorting is particularly popular as a soft-boundary alternative to filtering, with many users frequently opting to sort rather than filter because they don’t have a strict range in mind (”I care about cost, but I haven’t decided on a specific budget”), or for parameters where the user lacks the necessary domain knowledge to specify the hard cut-off points required by a filter.
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Even for users with extensive domain knowledge or just general web shrewdness, in testing sorting proved to be a powerful feature and was often combined with filtering (“I filter the cameras for ‘water resistant’ models and $300–$500, and then sort that list by customer ratings to see the ‘best ones’ first”).
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Learn More: Besides exploring the 188 “Sorting Tool” page design examples below, you may also want to read our related article on “Don’t Base ‘Customer Ratings’ Sorting on Averages Only” and “Category-Specific Sorting: A New Way to Sort Products”.
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Get Full Access: To see all of Baymard’s product list and filtering research findings you’ll need Baymard Premium access. (Premium also provides you full access to 71,000+ hours of UX research findings, 750+ e-commerce UX guidelines, and 77,800+ UX performance scores.)
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