e commerce customer journey map

Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping [+ Tips & Template]

Published: May 30, 2024

An ecommerce customer journey map helps you drive better business results whether you’re an ecommerce business owner or a marketing manager for an online store.

While ecommerce journeys may be quicker than business-to-business buying cycles, that doesn’t mean they have fewer customer touch points. It’s crucial to understand your buyers’ stages and the touch points that influence each sale.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to improve and map your ecommerce company's customer journey.

Table of Content s :

What is the Ecommerce Customer Journey?

Why is the ecommerce customer journey important, stages of the ecommerce customer journey, how to improve your ecommerce customer journey, ecommerce customer journey map.

The ecommerce customer journey traces a shopper's path from product discovery to purchase and beyond. It begins with awareness, moves to consideration where buyers weigh options, and ends with purchasing. Post-purchase experiences — like product usage and support — follow next, fostering repeat purchases and, potentially, brand advocacy.

In the awareness stage, customers might hear about your product through social media ads, find it through search engine results, or get word-of-mouth recommendations. Think of shoppers as explorers looking for a promise of something new.

As they move into consideration, they become discerning evaluators, comparing prices, reading customer reviews, and envisioning how your product fits into their lives.

Upon buying your product at the decision or conversion stage, new customers experience your product's features, enjoy its benefits, and even share it with friends. Your customer service takes over at this point as buyers encounter challenges or have questions related to product usage.

Finally, satisfied buyers become loyal customers in the retention stage and then, hopefully, brand advocates in the advocacy stage, spreading the word about your product.

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The ecommerce customer journey goes beyond tracking clicks. It’s central to decoding the hidden signals that make customers buy. Even after years in marketing, mapping customer journeys remains my go-to process for uncovering invaluable insights into buyers’ behavior, preferences, and pain points.

For starters, I have more control of my marketing and sales efforts as each step in a customer’s digital voyage unveils opportunities for optimization and innovation. From the moment they land at an online store to the final checkout process, every interaction shapes their perception, influences their likelihood of return, and cultivates brand loyalty.

Analyzing their paths empowers me to address these critical questions:

• Where do they hesitate to take action?
• What triggers their interest?
• Why do they abandon carts?

Armed with answers, I can tailor my marketing strategies to fit their experiences, address their concerns, and foster trust.

This understanding helps me devise smarter marketing campaigns, personalized product recommendations, and better user interfaces.

The takeaway is that an accurate map of your customer journey paves the way to improved conversions, retention, and brand advocacy.

1. Awareness

Potential customers become aware of problems and start researching to understand them better. In the process, they seek relevant solutions, dispel misconceptions, and consider solutions.

For instance, let’s say your shop sells products to help customers get organized and stay on task. If your prospect wants to establish a morning routine, they might start with a casual online search. After browsing through Google and catching sight of social media ads, they consider starting a journal to document their morning routine.

2. Consideration

During the consideration phase, shoppers weigh various products and strategies to address their needs.

Your prospect now has a clearer understanding of their purchase intent and starts vetting potential solutions. They may begin scouring ecommerce platforms like Amazon or even Google for available morning routine journals and evaluating their reviews.

3. Decision

In the decision stage, customers compare the features and prices of various options and then narrow down their choices. They weigh benefits against costs, seeking the best value.

Ultimately, shoppers will buy your product if it satisfies their needs or desires. For instance, perhaps your journal includes tips to help them establish their new routine.

4. Retention

The quality of your products and customer service is crucial to the customer retention stage. HubSpot’s 2024 Consumer Trends Report found the top purchasing factors for consumers include product quality (51%) and past experiences with a product or brand (25%) .

If your morning routine journal arrives late or poor packaging has led to ripped pages, your customer might not check out your other products.

Conversely, positive experiences encourage repeat purchases.

To boost retention, you can also employ strategic marketing, using ads retargeting and social media posts to keep products visible to previous buyers. Exposing your products frequently to delighted customers through a consistent, omnichannel presence improves your chances of attracting them to repurchase.

5. Advocacy

Prioritizing customer satisfaction fosters lasting business relationships. Customers at this stage will provide testimonials and advocate for your brand through word-of-mouth and social media endorsements.

If you habitually give first-time and repeat customers positive experiences, they’ll return, join your loyalty program, and bring their circle on board, increasing your customer lifetime value.

You can deepen your understanding of the ecommerce customer journey with HubSpot Academy’s free Ecommerce Marketing Course .

Understanding how the ecommerce customer journey works sets the stage for enhancing your own. In this section, I’ll show you how to use proven engagement principles to convert more customers.

1. Improve customer delight.

Customers who enjoy interacting with you are more likely to journey with your brand. The more you delight customers, the higher your campaigns’ conversion rates and the deeper customers engage with your brand.

Here's how to get a sea of happy customers:

• Personalize rewards for birthdays or special events.
• Host exclusive events.
• Provide branded swag.
• Cultivate a brand community.
• Surprise with flash sales or loyalty discounts.
• Engage one-on-one on social media.

Pro tip: What delights my customers may not delight yours, so be creative and keep exploring ways to build lasting connections.

2. Create FOMO.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) is the anxiety of feeling left out from enjoyable experiences others are having. Renowned business psychologist and author Robert Cialdini popularized the idea in his book Influence .

FOMO is one of the most potent marketing tools I use across all customer journey stages.

You can rouse this feeling in any of these ways:

• Display the number of products in stock.
• Add a sale countdown timer on the product page.
• Show a count of product views hourly or daily.
• Stress limited supplies.
• Spotlight event dates and set up a countdown email series.

At first, using FOMO may feel uncomfortable because you don’t want to come off as manipulative to buyers.

But FOMO is only a tool. It’s how you use it that makes it good or bad.

Customers have thanked me for notifying them that a product is on sale or an item they’re interested in will be out of stock soon.

3. Conduct surveys.

Search and market data give me a bird's-eye view of patterns in customer behavior and demographic metrics, but surveys help me get personal with them. Talking to customers online or in person helps unearth insights other data collection methods might miss.

I like to use both real-time survey methods — like video or phone calls and in-person or online chats — as well as prerecorded options, such as forms, videos, SMS, website pop-ups, and emails.

When I create surveys, I aim to gather information that expounds on what I learned from my initial audience research. I typically ask my customers questions related to why they act or feel a certain way.

For example, I may ask:

• Why choose us over competitors for this product?
• Which alternatives or competitors did you weigh before buying?
• What key issues do you need [product] to address?
• What's your budget for this solution?
• What [product] features do you prioritize and why?

The insights I gather from these questions reveal preferences and patterns among my target audience that will inform my business decisions.

For instance, if millennials are willing to spend $500 and boomers $1,500 on my product, I might adjust my offerings and messaging to attract boomers more.

4. Raise your social proof.

Customers have an easier time acting on recommendations and feeling confident when they see they’re not alone.

So, I engage the power of social proof.

Social proof is where people look to others' actions or opinions to guide their behavior. And it works. Over 20% of consumers (and 36% of millennials) have purchased a product in the last three months based on an influencer’s recommendation.

Here’s how I use it:

• Showcase reviews and testimonials.
• Display purchase count.
• Feature social media mentions.

If I can ensure shoppers see that others like my products, it boosts their likelihood of buying from my brand.

5. Personalize every touch point.

Nowadays, buyers expect you to call them by name. I go beyond this and create personalized journeys that meet customer needs and expectations using customer data from every touch point.

Here’s how I offer personalized experiences:

• Include the contact's name in messages.
• Customize offerings by location, purchase, or browsing history.
• Tailor exit pop-ups to each stage of the buyer journey.
• Craft offers that match prospective customers’ desires.

Thanks to HubSpot’s marketing automation software and my customer data, I can deliver unique experiences at scale. (As a HubSpot employee, I may be biased, but I’ve found that this tool is easy to use and can automate virtually any marketing task.)

For more tips, I recommend you read this article on customer journey thinking and watch the video below.

Now that we understand how the ecommerce customer journey works and ways to make it better, let's bring it to life with a map.

An ecommerce customer journey map shows the different steps your customer goes through and helps you plan how to improve each customer touch point. It highlights where they are in the buying process, their goals, and how they interact with your ecommerce store at various stages.

Use the ecommerce customer journey template below as your launchpad. Consider your customers’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and research interests to uncover how they arrive at buying decisions.

What is the customer thinking or feeling?

Weigh your ideal customer’s thoughts and motivations across the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Empathizing with, understanding, and addressing buyers’ expectations and worries helps guide them smoothly throughout the buying process.

Let’s assume a prospect is looking to go camping in the winter and exploring my outdoor gear web store for answers:

• Awareness. They're going camping in the winter for the first time and feel unsure about packing. They want to know what gear to buy and how to pack it in a simple and compact way.
• Consideration. They're comparing winter camping gear and feel uncertain about what to buy. They seek advice through blog posts and forums on finding compact, easy-to-use equipment to make their camping trip successful and enjoyable.
• Decision. The prospect decides to buy my brand’s winter camping gear. They feel more confident and prepared for their first winter camping adventure.
• Retention . Their new gear helped make their winter camping trip a success. They trust my brand, feeling confident in the quality and reliability.
• Advocacy . Impressed by the gear's performance, they share positive reviews online, encouraging others to buy the same equipment.

What is the customer’s action?

In my experience, customers can move forward from, return to, or repeat a previous stage or drop off the flywheel at any point in their journey.

Here’s how it could play out using that prospective customer from the winter gear example:

• Awareness. They want information about staying warm while camping in the winter, so they exchange their email address for my free warm-clothing guide and access to my community of winter camping buffs.
• Consideration. The prospective customer is considering thermal wear and other winter camping gear. So, they watch a live demo of how to combine thermal wear with other clothing items.
• Decision. The customer is serious about buying and looks for a discount.
• Retention . The customer asks follow-up questions to help them use the thermal wear and returns for more equipment for future adventures.
• Advocacy . My responsiveness to their questions and support requests wins them over, so they subscribe to my referral program.

What or where is the buyer researching?

Buyers forage for information from disparate sources before reaching a decision.

So, here’s how their research journey will go:

• Awareness. They engage with blogs, white papers, social posts, and short videos to find the information they need and answer questions about preparing for winter camping.
• Consideration. The prospect is now curious about camping gear, like outdoor heaters, lighters, lanterns, sleeping bags, camping chairs, thermal clothing, and backpacks to carry it all. So, they’re comparing the best options, reading case studies, and watching longer videos to help them understand the benefits and drawbacks of these items.
• Decision. They buy their preferred camping items from my website after weighing each product through buyer reviews, samples, and specification sheets and using my chatbot to ask questions.
• Retention . They might visit competitor websites or even buy competitor products to compare them with mine. They’ll also review post-purchase support documents.
• Advocacy . When referring a potential buyer, they’ll share my blog posts, guides, and knowledge base articles to educate their friends and contacts about my product.

How will we move the buyer along their journey with us in mind?

Using incentives in your calls-to-action (CTAs) can drive a faster response, and subtle messaging can guide buyers along their path.

Going back to the winter camping gear example, here’s what that could look like:

• Awareness. I ask prospects for their email address in exchange for free guides on how to choose the best camping gear for their needs.
• Consideration. Once I have their contact information, I’ll engage my leads with more valuable content related to winter camping, warming them up to chatting with my sales team or buying my camping gear.
• Decision. I demonstrate that I’m placing the customer’s interests ahead of profits by being honest about what my product can and can’t do. Whether the customer is ready to close a deal, sign up for a lesser offer, or part ways, I work to keep them in my flywheel for future sales or referral opportunities.
• Retention . I respond quickly to post-purchase questions and provide detailed user guides. I also offer free replacements for defective products.
• Advocacy . I proactively invite and incentivize customers to review and rate products and join my referral and loyalty programs .

Here’s what my map for the winter camping gear example would look like.

How to build an ecommerce customer journey map

Here are some tips for building and using your customer journey map:

• Define objectives. Clarify your goals, such as understanding pain points or enhancing the user experience.
• Identify personas. Create a detailed customer persona , including demographics, behaviors, and needs, to tailor the map and visualize your ideal customer’s experience.
• List touch points . Identify all points of interaction between your customer and business, from initial awareness to post-purchase. Consider taking the HubSpot Ecommerce Marketing Course to learn how to improve the user experience in every stage.
• Gather data. Collect quantitative and qualitative data from customer feedback, surveys, analytics, and interviews to understand experiences at each touch point.
• Map the current journey. Visualize the current customer experience by plotting the touch points and data on a timeline or diagram. Then, use a template to map your user journey.
• Identify pain points and opportunities. Highlight areas where customers face challenges and opportunities to improve their experience.
• Develop solutions. Brainstorm and highlight changes or enhancements to address identified issues, enhance your touch points for search engine optimization (SEO), and improve your user journey.
• Implement changes. Put the proposed solutions into action and adjust your processes, technology, or communication strategies accordingly.
• Track and update. Continuously track the performance of implemented changes and update your journey map to reflect new insights and business developments.

Here’s the takeaway: Mapping your ecommerce customer journey is vital for targeting the right audience and ensuring a great customer experience. Happy customers typically stick around longer and attract more buyers.

Creating the Best Ecommerce Customer Journey Possible

The best online shopping experiences result from understanding how customers go through the buying stages. Although the ecommerce shopping cycle is swift, customers still interact with multiple touch points before they buy, so you must plan carefully.

As a marketer, I rely on data, templates, and proven strategies to optimize each stage of the ecommerce customer journey. Delighting customers, creating a sense of urgency, asking for feedback, showing off happy customers, and personalizing experiences are all proven ways to generate desirable results.

In the end, a well-made map of how customers will experience your online shop helps attract more buyers, keep them coming back, and get them talking about your brand.

Ready to start? Look below for free templates to map your ecommerce customer journey.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How to create an ecommerce customer journey map (with examples)

In the highly competitive world of ecommerce, selling great products is not always enough. Customers expect fantastic experiences during every interaction with you—and if you don’t deliver them, your competitors will.

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So: how do you find the best opportunities to optimize your funnel, improve conversions, and grow your ecommerce business? With a little help from your new friend, the customer journey map .

Find new ways to grow ecommerce sales

Hotjar shows you what key user segments are doing on your site, so you can fix the problems hurting your conversions.

What are ecommerce customer journey maps?

Customer journey maps visualize the steps your customers take when moving through your conversion funnel . 

A basic map, like the one below, simply shows the key touchpoints customers go through on their journey.

An example of a simple customer journey map from CartsGuru

More sophisticated maps integrate detailed insights about the customer, such as their actions, thoughts, and needs, at different touchpoints. This allows you to take a walk in your customer’s shoes and find ways to improve your ecommerce user experience (UX) .

A map from MarketingMag.com.au revealing customer thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint

Some customer journey maps also integrate quantitative data into each step. By tracking key metrics—like your Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, or customer effort score—you’ll get a data-informed view of the weak points in your journey.

A customer journey map from Tallwave incorporating quantitative data

4 (very good) reasons to create customer journey maps

Sure, your company as a whole has a basic understanding of what customers do . But does every department have a consistent, detailed view of what they’re experiencing ?

Customer journey maps provide exactly that, bringing several key benefits with them: 

1. Understand your customers’ motivations, drivers, and point points

In ecommerce, buying journeys are rarely simple. They usually entail a range of emotions, questions, and pains—ranging from “how quickly can I get this awesome dress?” to “am I really getting the best deal?” and “why is this so complicated?”

Customer journey maps give you an at-a-glance view of these vital insights, helping your entire company empathize with your audience.

2. Get your teams working together

Improving the customer’s journey, even at a single touchpoint, often requires multiple teams.

For example, imagine your new customers are confused about how to use your latest product. In this case, your customer service team could report their feedback to your content team. Your content team can then create educational product videos to provide helpful (and necessary) guidance.

Cross-team coordination like this is faster and easier when your company has a shared view of the customer’s experience.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify who owns what

Imagine a scenario where a customer buys a product and feels it doesn’t meet their expectations. When they contact your company, should customer support help them, or a technical product expert?

For growing companies, the lines of responsibility often get blurred. Customer journey maps help you determine which team is responsible for key actions and support at each step of the way.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

With a clear overview of the customer’s journey, your team can quickly home in on the touchpoints where something’s going wrong.

For example, you might realize many customers are landing on your product page, but few are completing purchases. 

By mapping out the next steps they take and gathering data about their experiences, you discover that customers are dropping off at the shopping cart

A closer look at your behavior analytics data clearly shows visitors find the shopping cart UX confusing

With this knowledge, you can take action to simplify your customers’ shopping cart experience and track whether it helps you increase conversions .

What are the stages of the customer journey?

It’s important to remember that every customer’s journey starts before they land on your ecommerce site, and long after they make a purchase.

Most marketers consider the following stages when mapping out a customer journey:

❗️awareness.

Your customer’s journey starts when they become aware of a desire or challenge that your product addresses. This is where you can start appealing to them with content and marketing campaigns.

In the later stages of awareness, your customer educates themselves about the different products you have available.

💭 Consideration

In this stage, the customer considers whether your product is right for them. They may be trying to choose between several similar products or comparing your product with a competitor’s.

💡 Decision 

Your customer has decided your product is right for them , but is weighing up final hurdles like price, delivery time, and payment options. To complete the purchase, they’ll also have to navigate your checkout process.

💰 Retention

After the sale, your customer’s evolving perception of your company will depend on delivery, support, and the product itself. If your customer has a positive experience, they may continue spending with you.

❤️ Advocacy

A remarkable experience may result in a customer becoming an advocate at the end of their journey. This could mean telling others about your company, discussing your products on social media, or positively reviewing your business on public platforms.

How to create a customer journey map for your ecommerce company

Every customer journey map is different—the data you include will be unique to your company. But if you’re an ecommerce business of any size, there are five steps you’ll need to take:

Define your goal

Are you trying to get more sales from visitors on mobile? Or more customers advocating for you? Or perhaps reduce the bounce rate on your checkout page? 

By agreeing on a goal with your team, you can build your customer journey map with the right insights, metrics, and analyses in mind.

Gather relevant, accurate data

For your customer journey maps to be of maximum efficacy, you’ll want to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data . The more data you have, the better—but the data you include in your map should always relate to your overall goal.  

For example, let’s imagine that your goal is to increase sales. In this scenario, you could:

Learn how customers navigate your store across the shopping journey by conducting usability testing

Use surveys and interviews to understand what information customers need during the consideration phase

Gather behavior analytics data to uncover pain points and signs of frustration during the checkout process

Gauge overall satisfaction by tracking customer NPS across their entire pre-purchase journey

💡Pro tip: using Hotjar? Your job just got easier! With our Surveys and Feedback tools, you can ask visitors both closed and open-ended questions. For example, ask customers to rate your product page, then follow up by asking how you could improve it. 

And when you’re gathering customer data, consider our new product for user-research automation, Hotjar Engage , which makes it easier than ever to interview customers and run seamless user testing.

5 types of user data you need to create a customer journey map

If you choose to create a customer journey map, you’re already engaging in data-driven marketing . Make your maps as useful as possible by taking relevant information from a wide range of sources.

1. Website journey data

Google Analytics (GA) is an essential part of your ecommerce website analysis toolkit. Its reports and dashboards give you a high-level overview of how people use and move through your site. What’s more, Google Analytics has a range of segmenting capabilities that let you gather data relating to your defined user personas.

For example:

The Behavior Flow report shows you the paths customers are taking through your site and where they drop off

The Conversion Path report shows you what platforms your customers are using at each stage of their journey

💡Pro tip: make your analysis easier by connecting GA to Hotjar with our Google Analytics integration . Then, leverage User Attributes to filter Hotjar data for specific audience segments you identified with Google Analytics.

2. Behavior analytics data

Now that you know what journeys your visitors take, you’ll want to see what they’re doing on each page. This is where behavior analytics tools, like Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings , can help.

Scroll heatmaps show you where people stop scrolling on your product and support pages, showing you which parts of your page go unseen

Click heatmaps show you where people are clicking most, indicating how intuitive your UX design is and giving you ideas for improvements

Recordings let you rewatch individual journeys to find out how customers behave, where they get stuck, and what they do before clicking your call to action ( CTA )

3. Email queries, chat logs, and customer support logs

Your company’s everyday conversations with customers are a gold mine of insights. They reveal what users commonly get frustrated with, what information they need, and how often specific problems occur.

Ideally, use a tool to categorize and log queries and support requests from your customers. You can then hold regular reviews with your sales and support teams to see how the trends fit into your customer journeys.

Customer support platform Intercom visualizes common conversation topics

4. On-site and email surveys

Asking your customers for feedback is an effective way to understand their experiences at different parts of their journey. In addition to getting subjective, descriptive feedback, surveys also give you quantitative data (like NPS scores) to support optimization efforts.

Following an interaction with customer support: email a survey that asks respondents to rate their customer satisfaction level. Include an open-ended question prompting customers to describe what you could do better.

Following a successful purchase: target shoppers with an on-site survey asking them to submit an NPS. Then, track how this score changes as you update and improve to your checkout process.

5. Customer interviews

Having one-on-one discussions with customers is a great way to dig further into their needs, motivations, and pain points. You might find it helps to offer customers an incentive to speak with you, but satisfied customers will often do so for free. 

However, don’t focus solely on happy customers. Performing exit interviews with regular customers who change to another supplier can reveal a weak link in the customer journey.

❓Did you know? Hotjar recently added Engage , a user research tool, to our platform. Engage makes it easy to book, conduct, and analyze customer interviews, so you can find new insights more easily.

Create user personas for the customers you’re trying to serve

Depending on your goals, you might want to create multiple maps for different ‘types’ of customers. For example:

New customers + Existing customers

Actual customers + Ideal customers

B2B customers + B2C customers

Creating separate maps for your different customer types ensures more accurate, actionable maps. However, you’ll need a clear idea of who these customers are and how you can identify them. That’s why it’s a good idea to create a user persona for each distinct customer you’re trying to help.

An example persona from UXPressia

💡Pro tip: with Hotjar User Attributes, you can cross-reference data from other platforms to get insights into specific user segments. For example, use Google Analytics to create a segment of new users who visit your site after clicking an ad, then watch Recordings of their journeys.

Why are user personas helpful in customer journey mapping?

Depending on your goals, you may be interested in different user personas: to improve sales of a specific product, you’d want to understand the needs and actions of customers who bought that product. To increase repeat purchases, on the other hand, you’d need to know how existing customers navigate your site and what they need from future purchases.

In both cases, you’d want to see how their journeys differ from other customers and visitors. Understand what they do on their journeys, and you’ll find ways to serve them better.

By analyzing the journeys of people who buy your flagship product, you learn that they often visit a competitor’s site to compare products. Using this insight, you add a table that compares your product with others, keeping visitors on your site and boosting sales in the process.

By analyzing the journeys of existing customers, you learn that they begin looking at related products in your range around three months after an initial purchase. Accordingly, you start sending automated emails around month three to grow sales while increasing customer delight .

Note: traditionally, marketers created user personas with demographic information like gender, sex, and age. Today, many marketers find it helpful to use the jobs to be done (JTBD) framework.

JTBD views user personas less in terms of qualities and more in terms of goals, motivations, and desired changes . Of course, this is perfect for customer journey mapping!

Unravel your customer referral paths

Your customers interact with your ecommerce business in various places, both online and offline. Understanding how these touchpoints fit together—and delivering a consistent experience across them—is the goal of omnichannel marketing.

In some cases, their journey will be a straight line:

The prospect enters ‘best winter jackets’ into a search engine

They immediately find your blog, click through to your store, and make a purchase

A week later, the customer receives their order and goes on social media to share their satisfaction with the product

However, in other scenarios, the journey will be more complex:

A prospect hears about your clothing brand from a friend 

Weeks later, they see your brand on Instagram, visit your store, and sign up for your newsletter

The prospect then visits two other physical clothing stores to compare jackets 

A day later, they receive an email from you offering a 10% discount on jackets they previously viewed—they return to your online store to make a purchase

The customer has a small issue with the order and calls your customer support line to resolve it

As a business, you might want to serve the second customer better so they can become an advocate, too. But to map out their journey accurately, you need to know where they came to you from—in other words, their referral path.

Combine data from your different tools to understand your customer referral paths

Building an accurate map of omnichannel journeys is challenging but not impossible. Ideally, you’ll look at data from two different tools.

Look for referral paths in Google Analytics. The Behavior Flow report tells you where website visitors are coming from (e.g. organic search or email). 

Use surveys to fill in the gaps. For example, when a customer signs up to your email newsletter, send a survey to ask how they discovered your brand.

Combining both these data points gives you a more complete customer journey map. And if you’re using Hotjar, our Segment integration helps you view survey responses for different audience segments by leveraging User Attributes.

Create (and update) your maps

Having gone through the previous four steps, you can build maps for each key customer persona. Your team is now in a great place to analyze and improve critical touchpoints along the customer journey.

But don’t forget that your business is always evolving, so your maps need to evolve with it.

Update journeys as they change. As you add new products, features, and marketing funnels, map out the new journeys your customers take.

Track and update key metrics. If you’re including quantitative data in your maps, like NPS or CSAT scores, track changes and update your maps every quarter.

Start mapping your ecommerce journeys today

The more complicated your customer journeys are, the more opportunities you have to delight—or disappoint—your audiences. Customer journey maps give your company a shared framework for improving their experiences across the entire conversion funnel .

But remember: your customer journey maps are only as good as the data you used to create them. By researching the what , how, and why of your customers’ behavior, you’ll build effective customer journey maps that drive real impact.

Solve your biggest conversion challenges

With tools like Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback, Hotjar helps understand why visitors don’t convert—and gives you the insights and information you need to make them.

Ecommerce customer journey map FAQs

Can customer journey maps help us improve our web design.

Customer journey maps help you zero in on parts of the customer journey that need the most attention: i.e. the points where customers are falling off or feeling dissatisfied with their experience. 

You can then gather data around these conversion bottlenecks using behavior analytics platforms like Hotjar. If your research reveals a problem with web design , you can apply ecommerce CRO and web design principles to improve the page. Take a look at some recent web design examples to see how the best companies in the world are doing it.

How do early-stage ecommerce companies benefit from customer journey maps?

If your company is in an early stage of growth, you probably don’t have the resources to optimize your whole funnel. Customer journey maps help you identify the parts of your funnel to prioritize so you can use your resources efficiently. 

You can then start gathering data and using ecommerce design metrics to inform future improvements.

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How to create a customer journey map in e-commerce (+ free template)

The e-commerce market is growing rapidly. With new e-commerce businesses emerging daily, it is getting increasingly harder to stay competitive. So, how do you succeed in such a rapid and competitive environment?

Among all the variables of all the success formulas out there, there's only one constant — an exceptional customer experience. And other e-businesses cannot copy this ingredient.

And there’s one framework that is really good at helping you step up your customer experience game — e-commerce customer journey mapping.

• 1 Customer journey mapping
• 2 What is the e-commerce customer journey?
• 3.1 Set the goal
• 3.2 Define the scope
• 3.3 Use personas
• 3.4 Collect the data
• 4 E-commerce customer journey stages
• 5.1 Draft the backbone
• 5.2 Add some meat
• 6.1 Streamlined navigation
• 6.2 Personalization
• 6.3 Mobile optimization
• 6.4 Transparent product information
• 6.5 Efficient checkout process
• 6.6 Responsive customer support team
• 6.7 Post-purchase engagement
• 6.8 Social proof and trust signals
• 7 What to do next

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a visualization of every interaction happening between customers and your product or service at all stages of their engagement.

Here is what a complete customer journey map may look like:

You can use this technique to understand how your business performs from your customers’ standpoint, as it allows you to put together all the data and order it in a clear and comprehensive way.

Some of the things you can do with the help of customer journey maps in e-commerce are:

• Capturing all the touchpoints and channels customers go through when visiting your e-commerce website. And what’s most important, understand what happens during those interactions;
• Understanding how customers feel at every step of their journey with you and what you can improve so they get less dissatisfied and more happy with your service;
• Indicating the pain points of the journey and brainstorming solutions;
• Discovering moments of truth for your customer.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s proceed to a customer journey in e-commerce.

What is the e-commerce customer journey?

In e-commerce, a customer journey is a dynamic and evolving story shaped by individuals' interactions and experiences during their online shopping endeavors. At its core, it embodies the seamless fusion of technology, user expectations, and brand engagement.

This narrative extends beyond the mere act of making a purchase, encompassing every touchpoint from the first spark of awareness to the post-purchase engagement.

In this intricate journey, the significance lies not just in the transaction itself but in the holistic experience crafted by businesses. A successful e-commerce user journey is characterized by personalized interactions, user-friendly interfaces, and the ability to anticipate and cater to customers' needs.

The journey becomes a testament to a brand's commitment to customer satisfaction, weaving together elements of convenience, trust, and delight, resulting in loyal and returning customers.

Understanding and optimizing the e-commerce customer journey is pivotal for businesses seeking to forge lasting connections with their clientele. It is a strategic approach that goes beyond the transactional aspect, acknowledging that each customer journey phase influences the brand's overall perception.

A positive journey fosters customer loyalty, encourages repeat business, and can transform satisfied customers into advocates who willingly share their positive experiences with others.

An e-commerce customer journey is also a valuable source of insights for businesses aiming to refine their strategies. By analyzing customer behavior, preferences, and pain points along the customer journey, companies can adapt and enhance their offerings continually. This iterative process ensures a competitive edge in the market and positions the brand as one that prioritizes and evolves with its customers.

Ultimately, the e-commerce customer journey is a narrative of reciprocity — a continuous exchange between the customer and the business. When thoughtfully navigated and enriched, it becomes a powerful tool for businesses to drive sales and establish enduring relationships in the digital marketplace.

The prep-work before the actual e-commerce journey mapping

To take the most out of your customer journey mapping process, you will need to make some preparations beforehand. Make sure you’ve got all the following things covered before starting with journey mapping.

Set the goal

Start with setting clear and achievable goals before getting down to the mapping part. Here are some examples of the goals you might want to target for your e-commerce project:

• increasing conversion and overall sales of an online store;
• discovering pain points and problems in a given scope of the journey;
• brainstorming the solutions for discovered problems;
• reduce the number of refunds;
• increase the number of reviews.

You can pick one or a combination of them. The bottom line here is you need a goal so it both helps you track progress and define the scope of the journey area you want to map.

Define the scope

Set the scope of the journey you’re going to map out. Covering the entire customer journey in e-commerce will take too much time and effort. Most likely, it won't be feasible to complete such a challenging task in a single sitting.

Instead, you can either start off with the most problematic part that needs immediate attention or focus on the part of the journey you already know too well. This way, you will be able to start mapping without investing in additional research.

Consider starting your mapping exercise with the stages related to one of the crucial elements of an e-commerce website — checkout. Although it’s not the first thing customers face when purchasing online, according to the statistics, around 70% of products added to the cart eventually get abandoned.

This is a powerful argument for taking checkout-related stuff more seriously and analyzing how to improve the customer experience at that particular stage of their journey.

Use personas

If you think mapping out your website page by page is enough, think again. You need to map a customer journey with your customer in mind, differentiating between customer and business goals. That’s where personas come into play.

Speaking scientifically(ish), a buyer persona is a collective image of a particular group of customers that represents their behavioral patterns, goals, expectations, and frustrations.

Creating a journey map without knowing exactly who your customers are is like creating a map for everyone and no one at the same time.

When mapping journeys for an online store , you will find that some buyer personas are more tech-savvy, and some are less. They will also have different goals when interacting with your site, expectations at journey stages, and experiences. As a result, their customer journeys will also differ.

Take all of that into account before you start mapping the journey of a particular customer segment.

Take a look at this buyer persona that we created for an e-commerce customer journey map example in our persona building tool :

Collect the data

Research is an essential step that comes before analyzing the customer journey of an online store. Adding real-world data brings tangibility to your journey maps and helps you identify the most problematic stages of the journey.

For instance, you will need to know how many visitors made it to the checkout page, how many eventually completed the purchase, becoming new customers, and the percentage of those who dropped out. If you have a multipage checkout, it would be useful to know which product pages cause your visitors to abandon their cart.

Web analytics is an excellent source of data. And by the way, you can combine that data with journey maps using our customer journey mapping tool . It supports the integration with Mixpanel and Google Analytics , which will let you display real-time analytics data on your e-commerce customer journey maps in the form of a marketing funnel.

That way, you will have some hard data to back up your journey maps.

Here are other data sources that can be used to learn about your customer journey before putting it on the map:

• HotJar uses interactive heatmaps of customer clicks and actions to help you visualize how they engage with particular online store pages and where they need help.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) ranges from 0 to 10 and shows the willingness of your customer to recommend your product to others. This provides a simplified, yet highly effective vision of a brand’s popularity and customer loyalty .
• Teammates who can share knowledge about the actual customer journey and its particular stages. For example, if you decided to focus on improving the delivery stage, it would be reasonable to invite the stakeholders from the delivery department, from the head of the department to couriers who deal face-to-face with your customers.

E-commerce customer journey stages

What are typical e-commerce customer journey stages? We’ll explore them through a fictional example.

Imagine Sarah, an avid fitness enthusiast, scrolling through her social media feed. As she leisurely swipes through photos of scenic landscapes and adorable pets, she stumbles upon an eye-catching sponsored post showcasing a new line of high-performance activewear. It serves as the trigger, sparking the first phase of her e-commerce user journey: Awareness .

Intrigued, Sarah clicks on the post, delving into the brand's profile. She explores product images, reads captions, and clicks on a link leading her to the brand's website. Now, at the Interest stage, Sarah is on a quest for more information. She navigates through the site, exploring product descriptions and customer reviews, and perhaps watching a video highlighting the durability and style of the activewear.

The brand cleverly captures her interest, offering a 10% discount for first-time customers. Tempted by the offer and convinced by positive reviews, Sarah adds a few items to her virtual shopping cart. Now, she's transitioning to the Consideration stage, weighing the pros and cons of her selections.

As Sarah contemplates her choices, the brand doesn't let her enthusiasm wane. An automated email promptly lands in her inbox, acknowledging her cart activity and offering personalized recommendations based on her preferences. This thoughtful touch moves Sarah into the Decision-making stage, subtly nudging her closer to making a purchase decision.

Encouraged by the seamless online experience and the brand's customer-centric approach, Sarah confidently clicks the "Checkout" button. The purchase is complete, marking the Conversion stage. The brand doesn't stop there — they send a thank-you email, including a discount code for her next purchase and inviting her to join their loyalty program.

Sarah is now at the post-purchase, Delivery , stage. She eagerly awaits the delivery of her activewear, and the brand, through strategically timed follow-up emails, keeps her engaged by sharing fitness tips, styling ideas, and sneak peeks of upcoming collections. This not only ensures customer retention but also plants the seeds for Sarah's potential advocacy as a satisfied customer.

In this narrative, we've traced Sarah's e-commerce customer journey from awareness to post-purchase engagement, highlighting the importance of a seamless, personalized, and customer-centric experience throughout each step.

Let's now work together to create an e-commerce customer journey map example.

Creating an e-commerce customer journey map

It’s time to get down to actual mapping. First, you will need to draft the backbone (or skeleton) of the customer journey map. These are the stages a customer persona goes through while interacting with your online store.

Draft the backbone

Let’s continue with our delivery e-commerce customer journey map example and try to identify the substages of the delivery stage.

• Requesting the delivery. At this substage, customers complete the purchase and type in their delivery information. Usually, it is done at the checkout page, so it may be considered a major customer touchpoint to pay attention to at this substage.
• Confirmation call or email. Possible touchpoints of the substage: getting a confirmation email and communicating with a customer service agent.
• Waiting for the delivery. This might be the most irritating part of the delivery journey stage for many customers, so it’s a good idea to keep them updated on the delivery information while the item is on its way. Touchpoints may be the same as at the previous substage. Others could include, for example, getting email updates on the delivery status.
• Receiving the items. Contrary to the previous substage, it is the most joyful moment of the whole shopping process, so take your time to think about making it even more memorable. Touchpoints: courier, package.
• Signing the docs. Although this formality is kind of irrelevant for a customer at this point, make sure not to make it too complicated. Touchpoints: meeting a courier, signing delivery documentation.

Here is what the backbone of the e-commerce customer journey map will look like.

In the same way, you can divide the purchasing process into “Review cart”, “Checkout”, “Payment”, and other stages and analyze them in your map.

Add some meat

Let’s briefly look at other steps of creating a customer journey map.

• Customer goals and expectations

Adding customer goals and expectations will let everyone see what your customers pursue at each stage and how it aligns with the goals of your business. At the Search stage, this could be “finding the necessary product with minimum effort”; at the Waiting for the delivery substage, this is definitely “getting the product ASAP”, etc.

• Touchpoints

Identify the interactions happening between your business and customers at each stage: when visiting the homepage or the checkout page, during communication with the customer service agent, etc. This will help you determine the ones that need improvement and eliminate those that encourage your customers to move straight to your competitors.

• Processes & channels

Specify the channels the persona uses and what processes look like during their customer journey. Here are some channel examples: website, advertisement, social media, phone call, mobile app, email, etc. Make sure that the experience you deliver the same positive experience across all the channels.

• Problems & Ideas

Find the pain points the customer encounters while purchasing on your website. It can be a page that loads for years, poor website navigation, low-res images, slow and confusing checkout, lack of support, etc. After that, come up with ideas for solving these problems.

• Moments of truth

Moments of truth (MoTs) are the moments when a customer either stays with your business or leaves forever. For an e-commerce website, a site structure and design, the checkout page, communication with support, and the help center are the most common MoTs. So it's worth paying extra attention to such moments and ensuring everything about them is as customer-friendly as possible.

And that’s what you will see after you map out all these points and add some visual touch to your customer journey map:

How online stores can improve their user journey?

With a finished map in front of you, you will be able to determine problems your customers have to deal with at different parts of the journey. And, certainly, you will start thinking about the ways to solve them.

Online stores can enhance their user journey through a combination of intuitive design, personalized customer experiences, and customer-centric strategies.

Below are some practical ways online stores can improve their user journey experience, illustrated with examples.

Streamlined navigation

Consider the ease with which customers can navigate through the website. Implement clear and intuitive menus, categorize products logically, and provide a search bar for quick access.

For instance, the online store of a well-known electronics brand organizes products by category and features a prominent search bar, allowing visitors to find what they need effortlessly.

Personalization

Leverage data to personalize your online shopping experience. An online clothing company, for instance, could use past purchase history to recommend complementary products or offer exclusive discounts based on customer preferences.

Amazon's personalized product recommendations serve as an excellent example of how tailored suggestions can enhance user engagement.

Mobile optimization

Recognize the prevalence of mobile users. Ensure the online store is optimized for various devices, particularly mobile phones. A fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly design enhances the overall customer experience. Launching a mobile app is also a bright idea.

The mobile app of a popular food delivery service is a prime example of seamless mobile optimization, allowing visitors to browse menus and place orders effortlessly on their smartphones.

Transparent product information

Provide detailed product information, including specifications, sizing charts, and customer reviews. This transparency builds trust.

The online store of a cosmetics company, for instance, not only showcases product features but also includes video tutorials demonstrating the application of the products, enhancing the customer's understanding of what they look like on real people and confidence in their purchase.

Efficient checkout process

Simplify the checkout process to minimize friction.

A well-known online marketplace incorporates a one-click purchase option for registered users, reducing the steps required to complete a transaction. This streamlined approach saves time and reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment. 

Some of the customers will also value a guest checkout option.

Responsive customer support team

Prioritize responsive and accessible customer support. Live chat features, chatbots, and clear contact information contribute to a positive user experience. And make sure to respond to your customer emails.

An online tech company, for instance, utilizes a chatbot for instant assistance, guiding users through common troubleshooting issues and product inquiries.

Post-purchase engagement

Continue engaging with customers at post-purchase stages. Send order confirmations, shipping updates, and request feedback.

An online bookstore, for example, sends personalized book recommendations based on a customer's purchase history, encouraging ongoing engagement and future purchases.

Social proof and trust signals

Incorporate social proof elements, such as customer testimonials, ratings, and trust badges into your website pages. A popular travel booking website prominently displays user reviews and satisfaction ratings, influencing potential customers' decisions and fostering trust in the platform.

By integrating these strategies and learning from successful examples, online stores can create a user journey experience that, besides being efficient and enjoyable, also establishes a strong connection between the business and its customers.

What to do next

Creating a CJM is a good chunk of work, but it doesn't end there. Maximize its value by articulating a clear plan for implementing ideas and passing it on to the responsible individuals. 

Doing all that is so much easier with UXPressia as it allows collaboration with all the teammates simultaneously and has exporting and sharing capabilities.

In addition to that, we have created e-commerce customer journey map examples (and many more customer journey map examples) that already include some general stages and touchpoints.

SEE E-COMMERCE TEMPLATES

This is the updated article originally published in March 2019.

Rate this post

Hey Dan! Great article, can you please share with us high-quality pictures that we can read the details on the picture “complete customer journey map”? thanks!

Hey Netanel!

Adding analytics to a customer journey map in ecommerce is very powerful, great feature. It also means you have to regularly revisit and update the map with new data, which means you can track implementation progress and discover new areas for improvement. Thanks for the post

A nice customer journey ecommerce example, but I think what might be missing here is retention. We try to include it as the final stage for all our maps. At the very least, it helps us keep in mind that the ultimate goal is not only for the customer to have a good experience, but for them to actually come back to shop with us.

I couldn’t agree more! Creating a CJM is a vital step in the process of providing an exceptional user experience, but it’s equally important to have a clear plan for the implementation of the ideas generated from it. Also, thank you for the ecommerce customer journey map example. I’m gonna try and build my own map, using it as a reference. It’s always a headstart and offers a solid foundation. I’m looking forward to exploring UXPressia and leveraging its capabilities to create an outstanding CJM for our customers.

How to Make Sense of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

No one can deny how big the ecommerce market is. Global ecommerce sales are projected to nearly double to $6.5 trillion by 2023. Its share of total retail sales is also growing, particularly in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

So we know the sector is massive, but how complicated is it? Surely it is just a simple matter of finding the product you want, buying it, then waiting for delivery. Or is there far more to the ecommerce customer journey? There are multiple factors, from lead times to customer service, that makes an ecommerce business a good ecommerce business (or not). 

Modern business, especially ecommerce , is about identifying and utilizing the best tools available. And that covers everything from live video conference software to good CRM management systems. 

Smaller businesses need to find such tools without breaking the bank. Fortunately, they can choose from the best free business apps that will provide great service without denting the budget. Having the ability to be agile and to adapt to changes can be a major positive for your business. 

If you look at a successful online retailer such as Larq , you will see a well-constructed site that is easy to navigate and that also offers links to their various social media platforms. This is a good example of how an ecommerce site should look. It shows they have looked at the customer journey and optimized their site to make it a positive one. 

You need to know each stage of that journey, how those stages affect customer experiences and their relationship with you, and how you can improve the journey at every level and customer touchpoint . Let’s look at how the customer journey unfolds and what factors of customer journey mapping that are important for you to understand.

What is the Ecommerce Customer Journey?

That quote about life from Ralph Waldo Emerson can also be applied to ecommerce businesses. While it is easy to think about the destination—that purchase arriving in the customer’s hands—it is also very much about the journey and what happens en route to that final destination. Just as with life’s journey, every stage of the ecommerce journey has its own features and qualities. 

Our customers no longer buy just a product, they buy the whole experience of being a customer, they buy your brand qualities, your mission and values, and more. They buy into the ease of your processes, the information you provide, the convenience, the quality of your aftersales (and presales if needed) customer service. In short, they look at the whole package you offer.

We all do process mapping for our businesses as a matter of course, so we should be doing the same for the customer experience. You need to understand every aspect of how your business operates, from dealing with logistics to ensuring your customers are happy. 

And do not be afraid to use shortcuts. The very reason tools such as templates are offered is to make it easier for you to conduct business. They can save you time and money and it can be easy to find one that suits you. 

It is not only the price of something that matters to them, it is everything that surrounds it, including how they access your site or app (and how easy it is to use), how you communicate with them across different channels, possibly even using companies like Slack , and how quickly you respond to their inquiries. In short, it is about providing an ecommerce customer journey map that meets all of their needs. 

Focus not only on your customers’ journeys, but also on their relationship with you; that’s important whether you are a small business or a large international one. Investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software is highly advised, especially when you have a multichannel or omnichannel business. 

There are also other aspects to consider. Many people now ask ‘ what is affiliate marketing ’, as offered by MaxBounty, and what is its place in online retail? If you use a strategy such as affiliate marketing, then you need to make sure that a customer’s journey is consistent across all the options open to them. Whether they find you via your own channels or through an affiliate.  

5 Stages of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

So we recognize that the customer journey is far more than a simple buying process. We also recognize that we need to know how to develop a successful ecommerce fulfillment strategy that helps us win and retain customers. Knowing the main stages of that journey is essential to both mapping it and ensuring that it is as optimized as possible. 

And when a business operates across many channels (omnichannel or multichannel ), you need to recognize that their journey may differ greatly depending on which channel they are using. 

1. Awareness.

Every journey has a starting point, and in the ecommerce business, that starting point is awareness. This is the stage where the customer discovers your product/service and your brand. This is also where you discover how they found you. Did they find you via a search engine (thus validating your SEO strategy)? Did they see an ad on social media or in a more traditional medium? 

You can not only see where they came from but also what behaviors they are showing once they have ‘arrived’. Do they look at particular landing pages that give you an idea of what products they are interested in? You could also describe this as the first learning stage; the customer is learning about your business and you are learning their preferences and needs. 

2. Consideration. 

In this stage, the customer begins to show real interest in particular products or services and move beyond general browsing. For example, with a cosmetics company such as Bliss World , they may start looking at the vegan skincare range, letting you see that this is their specific interest product-wise. 

From your organization’s perspective, this stage of behavior allows you to analyze what works and what doesn’t. Those analytics can help you reduce bounce rates and encourage further investigation by the customer. 

3. Conversion. 

One of the magic words in ecommerce, but this stage is not always a guaranteed sale. In some cases, this stage can include those customers who have added a product to their cart (or to their wishlist) but have not yet proceeded to actually buying it. In most cases, though, we do consider this to be the stage at which a prospective customer becomes an actual customer who adds to your conversion rate. 

It is at this stage that you as a business have to begin delivering on any promises you may have made to get the customer to this point. Part of that delivery is making sure all your processes, such as marketing, sales, customer service, etc., are aligned and are delivering the same message and quality of service. 

4. Retention. 

Another of those magic words. Having a customer make a single purchase is satisfying, but having them return again and again to buy is even more satisfying. This means they are very happy with most or all aspects of their journey and experience to date. From this point they begin to exhibit brand loyalty and may always look at your site before others. 

The thing for businesses to be aware of at this stage is that providing an excellent experience once is fairly easy, but providing it time and time again is where the challenge lies. 

5. Advocacy. 

This stage is the Holy Grail of the customer journey but do not expect to achieve it with every customer. Most companies fall short at stage four, but those who do manage to retain customers are then hoping that those people become advocates and brand ambassadors with a high lifetime value. At this stage, your best customers are not only buying but interacting at a high level. 

They will interact with you across most if not all of your touchpoints, such as your homepage, any blogs, social media, etc. More importantly (from your marketing perspective), they will be sharing information that you post on their own platforms and will actively advocate and talk about your products/services. That can also include recommending you to people and writing reviews. 

Building an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

An ecommerce customer journey map is a visualization of all the potential experiences a customer may have with your organization. Such a map also highlights the sequences those experiences are most likely to occur in. It can allow you as a business to identify strengths and weaknesses, and thus make improvements where needed. 

That customer journey may consist of all the stages we previously listed or they may only cover some of them, if customers do not move to later stages. What you need to focus on is that a customer journey map will show you all the possible permutations of what the customer experiences, whether only one or two stages or all five.

How Do You Build Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps?

Being able to map the customer journey offers many benefits, but if you have never undertaken this exercise before, where do you start? What things do you need to consider before starting? 

1. Perspective.

The first important thing to note is that you need your map to be from the customer’s perspective. So, detach yourself from your professional role and start the process as if you were an everyday customer. This can also help you understand the overall customer persona. 

To do so, pick a product or service your company offers. Use various terms on search engines to see what results come up. Read any associated material including reviews, articles, and blogs. Then visit your actual site to view the product there. Take notes on how the various customer touchpoints felt and how the experience of visiting the site unfolded. 

2. Research. 

Put together a focus group that consists of your main demographic targets. Ideally, they will not know what company or brand has formed this group. Pick one of your products or services and ask the focus group to find and buy that item online. Observe and record how they find the item, what paths they take, and what outcomes unfold. 

Once the focus group has finished their exercise, take the results and compare them with your experience from part one. By analyzing the two exercises, you can see if you and your customers think in the same way, and will also have a wider overview of touchpoints and interactions.  

3. Understanding.

You now have a better overview of how customers interact with your business and how the various touchpoints perform. You now need to understand what those various actions mean in terms of engagement strategy. Did any touchpoint perform particularly badly? By analyzing the information you have collected, you can see what action you need to take next. 

Your aim is to have your ecommerce site performing at an optimum level at every touchpoint you (and your customers) have identified. Those touchpoints can range from your own site to your social media platforms to search engine rankings. They can also include independent touchpoints such as review sites. 

4. Goals and pain.

You now have some of the foundations of your customer journey map in place. But it is more than just identifying the touchpoints and engagements you have observed. You also need to understand the goals of the customer and the pain points they experience. It can help greatly if you list some of the insights gained from your observation and data collection:

Goals . What is the customer’s ultimate goal(s)? What is it they want to achieve?

Emotional response . What parts of the process make the customer happy? Or what elements make them unhappy or frustrated? 

Pain points . What things cause issues for the customer and would they like to see improved? 

5. Visualization.

Image source  

You should now have enough (likely a lot) of information that tells you what the customer experiences. The problem is that this information is not easy to digest, so you want to simplify it and create a visual that is easy to look at and understand. How you format it will depend very much on your own specific business model. 

You may decide to create more than one visual, especially when you are a larger company and may have different teams working on different areas. For example, if you have a dedicated social media team, you may decide to create a journey map that particularly pertains to social media touchpoints, pain points, experiences, etc. 

Why is the Customer Journey Important?

Do you really need to make a customer journey map? What benefits does it bring you? Knowing why it is important is as crucial as understanding the whole process itself. There are many reasons why it is not only important, but should be an integral part of your ecommerce business. 

Efficiency . It can help you streamline the customer experience and journey by identifying if there are too many steps or touchpoints between the customer starting their journey and ending it. 

Effectiveness . Does the required journey make sense to your customers? Acknowledging that we all do things differently, from how we search to how we navigate a site, creating a process that has a general effectiveness for most is a major benefit of a customer journey map. 

Understanding . Knowing and understanding your customers, how they think, what they need, what they like and don’t like, is another crucial factor in determining how to create the best possible customer journey. In fact, this is an area where many organizations fail as they focus more on creating the perfect journey for them, rather than their customers. 

Setting goals . A good customer journey map can help you identify and set better and more realistic goals. The combination of a human perspective and the hard data you have collected ensures you are more in touch with what makes your business thrive and grow. It also helps you monitor and tweak in real time as you move forward. 

Planning . Every business has one eye on the future; new products and services, expansion, etc. Having an accurate customer journey map, and understanding it, means that you can more accurately focus on those future events. 

Reducing pain . Pain points are the bane of any online stores and can lose you customers if not identified and remedied. You may be surprised by how many pain points exist once you have completed your journey map. Once you have identified them, you can take action to remove them or to reduce their effects. 

How Ecommerce Stores Can Improve Their Customer Journey

For companies looking closely at their customers’ journeys for the first time, it can sometimes be daunting when flaws and gaps are identified that are having a very real effect on your business. Mapping the customer journey is one thing, but knowing how you can act on the data you have identified and improving the customer journey and experience is another. 

1. Create touchpoints at every stage.

Anywhere a customer interacts with your brand is a touchpoint. Seeing an ad, visiting your site, looking at independent reviews, contacting your business to find store locations, and finally making a purchase. All of these are touchpoints. Going back to the five stages of the customer journey we discussed earlier, you need to have touchpoints for each stage. 

Each touchpoint serves a purpose and plays its part in optimizing the overall customer journey. So each touchpoint you create has to fulfil its specific purpose (ad attracting interest, checkout process quick and uncomplicated, etc.) Ensuring you have multiple touchpoints that fit their respective stages and work properly is essential. 

2. Optimize your website for every device.

It is worth remembering that around half of all internet traffic originates from mobile devices . So if your website performs poorly when accessed from a mobile device, you are in effect alienating half your potential customer base. Optimization is key to offering a good experience to all. 

It can help to look at great websites that are well optimized, such as Skullcandy , so you can see what is needed. The screenshot below shows how well you can view their products from a mobile device, making online shopping easier for customers. 

And there are a few factors to take into consideration when optimizing your site:

Test your site . Knowing your site works well on mobile devices is absolutely crucial. You can do this manually at first simply by accessing your site via several different devices. Look especially at loading times and how the site looks on a small screen. For more in-depth testing, use Google’s free testing tool . 

Web host . Make sure your web host offers the speed and resources required to make your site fast and responsive. A slow and unresponsive home page and website will put customers off. You also want a host that guarantees the minimum of downtime. 

Apps . Consider launching an app to complement your website. They are not as expensive as you think and they can help boost both sales and engagement . 

3. Use proactive customer support.

Don’t wait for problems to happen and for customers to contact you. Anticipate the problems or questions most likely to occur and provide answers and solutions that will keep your customers happy. Offering proactive customer support has a number of benefits. 

Better customer retention rates. Being proactive means you’re more likely to have happy, loyal customers.

Less calls to your support team. By solving problems proactively, customers can see the solutions themselves and thus will make less calls to you, freeing up your team to deal with more complicated queries and also reducing waiting times. 

More first time customers. People talk about the good service they receive and that includes proactive support. When satisfied customers share their experiences, that can lead to new first-time customers. 

Increased productivity. Proactivity means better communication. And that means your team has more time to listen to and help customers who call and to collect more information and data.

Communication. You are probably already using video and messaging collaboration tools for sales teams , so why not ensure you also have great tools to communicate with customers. Chatbots and AI are great ways of proactively helping your customers find information. 

4. Personalization is key.

It is neither a secret nor a surprise that people like a personal touch, and that is true whether in ‘real life’ or in online shopping and ecommerce marketing. That means going beyond using their name (which you can do with website automation or in marketing emails) and also recognizing their particular interests and buying habits. 

Using tactics such as dynamic content marketing, which can customize content according to buying preferences, location, age, gender, etc., means you are offering a personalized approach that can lead to increased sales and better customer retention. Automation and analytics can be the two drivers when it comes to personalizing the customer journey, so use them wisely. 

Smaller businesses may feel they could be overwhelmed by these demands, but with so much technology and automation available on a budget, it is not that difficult to do. There are many mobile apps for small business owners that can help with factors such as communications and social media posting, so see what tools can both help you and save money that may be spent elsewhere. 

5. Gather data as much as possible and be flexible.

Data is not a one off exercise. Collect as much data as possible in the early stages, but keep collecting it always. Collect data not only on customer behavior and the customer lifecycle, but also general info via surveys, polls, etc. on your social media platforms and via email. The data you collect is a hugely important resource and offers you several benefits and potential uses.

And it is, of course, not just about collecting data, but about analyzing it and interpreting it efficiently. Consider using one of the many tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you with this. Identify what metrics, such as KPIs, matter most to you. A good KPI helps show your business is healthy. 

Data is not just a collection of information, it offers tangible benefits that can help your business grow by developing strategies for the future . 

Understand the market . Collecting and analyzing consumer data helps you understand how your ideal customers behave online. It helps define and segment particular demographics, understand better what customers want, and see ways to improve the overall experience throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Expand your database . The more information you have on customers, the bigger, and more efficient, your database is. And with detailed data, you can segment your customers (and potential customers) into groups that make more personalized strategies, such as dynamic content marketing, easier to achieve. 

A larger database allows you to use a variety of strategies. For example, instant messaging can be a great way to boost your ecommerce sales.  

Better marketing . By constantly collecting data, you get better insights into which of your marketing strategies and campaigns have worked well. The more data you have, the easier it is to identify which sorts of campaigns are best, and what platforms reach more of your ideal customer base and generate more leads. 

Those campaigns could be via social media or you could identify what sort of email campaigns best drive sales.  

Customer relationship management is perhaps one of the most important factors for ecommerce businesses to consider and it is worth investing in good CRM software to help with this. You may understand the customer journey, but managing that journey on an ongoing basis is a big task. 

Aim to be consistent and to ensure you provide the same positive customer experience throughout every journey. Your online store has to be as accessible and helpful as any physical store would be. And that applies to every channel, platform, and touchpoint where your customers interact with you. 

Ecommerce businesses range from massive multinational corporations to small solo entrepreneurs. Customers range from occasional purchasers of low value items to regular buyers of high value goods. No matter who you are or who they are, you should be aiming for parity so that every journey and experience is positive.

Pohan Lin is the Senior Global Web Marketing Manager at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP and video conferencing solutions providers. He has over 18 years variety experience in web marketing, online SaaS business and ecommerce growth. Pohan has a passion for innovation and communicating the impact that technology has in marketing.

How to build an ecommerce customer journey map

Optimizing the journey a customer takes from finding a brand to making a purchase is an essential step toward increasing ecommerce conversions.

An ecommerce customer journey map is a great way to analyze customer experience and identify any blockers visitors face that prevent them from making a purchase.

This is Carts Guru's ultimate guide to creating an ecommerce customer journey map.

What we'll cover in this guide:

• What is an e-commerce customer journey?
• Why map your e-commerce customers' experience?

Step 1: Define customer personas

Step 2: analyze relevant data, step 3: identify key touch-points, step 4: create an e-commerce customer journey map.

• Step 5: Using an e-commerce customer journey map

Let's get started.

What is an ecommerce customer journey?

An ecommerce customer journey begins with one of two key things, a problem to solve, or an opportunity to grasp, ie. a ‘need’ or a ‘want’.

Let’s look at purchasing a new exercise bike as an example. The customer journey could begin with a problem, ie. their old bike is broken or out of date. In contrast, it could start with an opportunity, like a tempting advert that sparks the customer’s interest in the new bike.

Customers happy with their current brand will stay loyal to them, but for customers wanting to switch to a new brand the first step in the journey will be a competitor analysis.

Potential customers read reviews and testimonials, ask friends and family for advice, and compare the pricing of various brands. They may go back and forth a few times before making a final decision.

Once the customer has decided on a product, they then return to a website, find the product, complete the purchase, and wait for their item to arrive.

The customer’s journey doesn’t end when they receive their order. E-merchants need to keep customers engaged to encourage repeat purchases and drive brand loyalty. Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any successful e-commerce business, they leave positive reviews, provide social proof to friends and family, and continue to purchase year after year.

Why map an ecommerce customers' experience?

It’s not enough for an e-commerce store to sell great products. There's an abundance of choices easily available online, and customers are searching for something more. They want an amazing, memorable experience.

The best way for an e-merchant to deliver that is through a highly personalized customer journey. E-merchant’s need to analyze the entire process each customer goes through when buying a product, then work to improve that journey. This means customizing every detail, from the very first time a customer comes across a brand to the day they become an advocate.

An e-commerce customer journey map is the logical way to organize all these complicated data points. E-merchants can visualize the customer journey and clearly see where any problems lie.

Essentially, a customer journey map should help e-merchants do the following:

• Provide a smooth journey that helps customers solve problems and achieve goals
• Remove friction and obstacles in the buying process
• Make the brand experience enjoyable and recommendable

It's impossible to design a map without knowing who it's for. E-merchants need to have a clear picture of their target customer groups before they can build the perfect journey for them.

In order to define a customer persona, e-merchants need to ask themselves the following questions:

• Who's buying from you right now? Find out their age, gender, location, occupation, income level, and interests.
• Who benefits from your product?
• What are their pain points, goals and dreams?

Customer personas shouldn't be vague. Combine common traits into numerous specific personas with memorable characteristics, even a name. Include any objections they might have.

For example, an e-commerce store selling silver fashion jewelry might have the following customer persona:

Katie, a single 26-year-old female who studied advertising, and works in a marketing company, earning £28,000 a year. She lives with housemates in London and buys clothes from Zara and Cos, often shops on her mobile phone. She enjoys meeting friends for drinks and dinner, yoga and goes on 2 holidays a year. She likes affordable but good quality, unique jewelry. Potential obstacles: high prices and a website that isn't mobile-friendly.

Create as many personas as are relevant, then design a separate customer journey map for each persona.

E-merchants need to dig deep into any available data about customer interactions with their e-commerce website and social media pages.

The Google Analytics Behavior Flow Report is a great way to track this. The report shows the flow of traffic through a website that e-merchants can use to find out the common paths, and determine which ones result in more sales.

Are people going directly to checkout after viewing a product, or going back to browse more options?

Hotjar is another powerful tool that shows users colorful, visual heat maps of how visitors interact with a website. E-merchants can track details like mouse hover, clicks, attention, and scroll.

Heat maps essentially tell e-merchants how visitors interact with their site. From this, e-merchants can determine which website elements appeal to visitors, and which are not as useful.

Another key metric is cart abandonment. Find out how many customers make it to check out but leave before completing the purchase. E-merchants can track cart abandonment and automate emails, SMS, and Funnels to bring customers back to complete the purchase.

Similarly, e-merchants can gather data by simply speaking with customers. Conduct surveys and encourage customers to write testimonials or reviews. Read through customer queries and analyze their conversations with support services.

When measuring data, look out for patterns. Where are customers dropping off? Which pages do customers visit most, and in what order? Which pathways lead to the most sales?

E-merchants need to understand these patterns of user behavior before they can optimize an e-commerce customer journey.

A touchpoint is any time a customer or prospect comes into contact with a brand.

E-merchants need to make a list of every possible way a customer could interact with their brand. This list should include everything from seeing a social media ad to a search result, receiving a retargeting email, leaving a review, or speaking with customer support.

Divide the list into three categories - before, during, and after purchase. There will be a lot of crossover between the three categories.

At this stage, e-merchants will start seeing things from the customers' point of view.

We often see e-commerce customer journeys divided into three stages - awareness, consideration, and decision.

However, what about after the purchase? Repeat purchasing, positive customer reviews, and social proof are all essential to e-commerce success.

Because of this, e-merchants should divide a customer journey map into five stages:

Consideration

For each of the five stages, identify the key touch-points and the customer’s emotions, goals, and needs. Then, establish the brand's goal and actions to take at each stage.

Let's examine each stage of the journey in more detail.

In the awareness stage, customers are just finding out who a brand is and what they represent.

They may have discovered the brand passively through an advertisement, social media or blog post, or actively through organic search.

Therefore, at this stage, the goal of an e-merchant is educating, answering questions, and establishing expertise on the relevant subject matter.

E-merchants need to gain the trust of potential customers, generate some interest, and convince them to find out more.

In this stage, a brand has sparked the customers interest. They’re considering a specific product, but they may be weighing up different options and looking at similar products on competitor’s sites.

Potential customers might do research outside of the pre-defined customer journey, and look at things like social media pages and customer reviews. In this stage, e-merchants may have success in winning customers with a retargeting ad.

At this stage, the primary goals for an e-merchant are to position their product as the perfect solution, explain its advantages, justify the price, keep customers interested, and win their trust.

Once the customer has decided to purchase, an e-merchant’s main goal is to remove any friction that might cause them to abandon their cart. Touch-points at this phase include the website checkout as well as social media, email, or telephone support.

Ensure that the checkout process is quick and simple with no blockers to purchase. If customers need to sign up for a membership or fill out unnecessary information at checkout they might give up and go elsewhere.

Customers may also have some final questions before they purchase, and brands that provide attentive customer service and help customers choose the right product stand a better chance of converting a sale.

Up to the last minute, e-merchants should re-emphasize their value proposition, reinforce customer’s decisions, and create a sense of urgency by showing limited availability.

Don't forget about customers after they've made a purchase. Repeat customers are vital for long-term e-commerce growth, so e-merchants need to work hard at retaining newly won customers .

Automatically enroll customers in a multi-channel post-purchase campaign and keep them engaged with regular emails and SMS messages.

E-merchants can ask customers for feedback, answer any questions they have, and send personalized offers relevant to their purchase. Build a community of loyal customers and keep them up to date on product releases, invite them to special sale events, and reward them with VIP deals.;

Social proof is an invaluable asset for e-merchants. Treat customers who go on to become brand advocates like the VIPs that they are.

Keep in touch with VIP customers via email and SMS campaigns. Ask VIP customers to join rewarding affiliate programs, give valuable brand feedback, and post about specific products or events on their social media sites.

Brands can even acquire testimonials from these loyal customers to publish on their website or blog.

Thank VIP customers for spreading brand awareness with exclusive offers and discounts and make sure they know their efforts are valued.

Step 5: Using an ecommerce customer journey map

An e-commerce customer journey map should help e-merchants answer the following questions:

• How do customers discover your product?
• What research do customers do before making a purchase?
• What "moments of truth" lead to sales or abandonment?
• Do customers consider any of your competitors?
• Do customers have a positive experience on your site?
• How could you improve the experience?
• At what stage in the journey are you losing customers?

The map should tell e-commerce store owners where they need to invest more time and resources.

For example, if people are leaving an online store after waiting too long for a response from customer service, invest time and effort into supplying 5-star support.

If visitors aren't reading through product descriptions, try simplifying them.

If potential customers leave because of unexpected shipping costs, reduce them, or make them clear upfront.

Although it may seem like a long and complicated process, mapping out a detailed e-commerce customer journey is absolutely worth it.

As a result, e-merchants will be able to streamline and optimize the customer’s journey to purchase and beyond.

Throughout the process, e-merchants will learn to empathize with website visitors and adopt a more customer-focused mentality. Furthermore, they will know where to invest the most time and money to get results.

Recommended Articles:

Win-back campaigns: why you need them & 6 tips for success.

8 Effective ways to drive repeat purchases

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Your 101 Guide to Customer Journey Maps For Ecommerce

Are you running an ecommerce business and wondering how to enhance your customers’ experience? Understanding the customer journey is crucial in ensuring a seamless and satisfactory shopping experience.

In this article, we will explore the concept of ecommerce customer journey mapping, its importance, the stages involved, and how to create an effective customer journey map. We will also discuss common challenges in this process and provide tips for a successful ecommerce customer journey map.

So, let’s dive in and learn how to improve your ecommerce business through effective customer journey mapping.

What is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce , short for electronic commerce , refers to the buying and selling of goods or services over the internet or other electronic channels.

Ecommerce has transformed the way businesses operate. Its evolution has led to the tremendous growth of online shopping. With the advancement of digital marketing , ecommerce has expanded its reach, allowing businesses to connect with a global audience.

Digital marketing strategies, such as social media advertising , email marketing , and search engine optimization , have greatly influenced the growth of ecommerce . These tools provide businesses with the means to engage and attract customers in the digital space.

What are the Different Types of Ecommerce?

Ecommerce encompasses various types of transactions, including business-to-consumer (B2C) , consumer-to-consumer (C2C) , and business-to-business (B2B) interactions.

There are three main types of online transactions: B2C , C2C , and B2B . Each type has its own unique characteristics.

B2C transactions are commonly seen in the online retail sector, where businesses sell directly to consumers.

C2C transactions, on the other hand, involve individual consumers buying and selling goods and services to each other through online marketplaces.

B2B transactions are crucial for the procurement of products and services between businesses, playing a vital role in the global supply chain and enterprise operations.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important for Ecommerce?

Customer journey mapping holds significant importance in the realm of ecommerce as it provides invaluable insights into customer interaction , preferences, and behavior throughout the online shopping experience.

E-commerce businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ needs, pain points, and motivations by analyzing customer journey maps . This information can help identify areas for improvement in user experience , optimize the online storefront layout, and increase overall customer satisfaction .

Using this strategic tool can also aid in aligning marketing efforts , providing personalized recommendations , and offering post-purchase support . This can ultimately lead to long-term customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases .

Stages of a Customer Journey Map

A comprehensive customer journey map typically encompasses stages such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase experience , reflecting the various touchpoints and interactions a customer undergoes during their ecommerce journey.

At the awareness stage , customers may encounter the brand through social media, online ads, or word-of-mouth. This leads them to the consideration stage , where they research and compare products or services.

The purchase stage is where the actual transaction takes place, and post-purchase experience involves follow-up communication, feedback gathering, and ensuring customer satisfaction. User satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are crucial to measure the effectiveness of these touchpoints throughout the customer journey. By incorporating these elements, businesses can better understand and enhance their customers’ journeys.

The awareness stage in the customer journey is characterized by user research, product discovery, and initial interactions with the ecommerce platform or brand.

During this stage, understanding user behavior through meticulous research and analysis is crucial for capturing users’ interest. Product discovery not only involves identifying the right products for the target audience but also creating engaging touchpoints to draw them in.

The initial customer interactions set the tone for the entire journey, making it essential to ensure a seamless and personalized experience, fostering trust and driving product engagement.

Consideration

During the consideration stage of the customer journey, users evaluate their needs, explore options, and engage in the checkout process to make informed purchase decisions.

Today’s consumers prioritize convenience, quality, and value in their purchasing decisions. They also seek personalized recommendations and tailored solutions that align with their preferences.

When making a decision, users often weigh the pros and cons, compare features, and assess the overall user experience. The checkout process is a critical factor, with customers expecting seamless navigation, secure payment options, and transparent policies . This can greatly influence their decision to complete the purchase.

Therefore, it’s essential to understand customer preferences and provide relevant information during the checkout process. This can have a significant impact on their buying decisions.

The purchase stage marks the conversion point in the customer journey, often linked to the culmination of the sales funnel and the completion of the transaction by the customer.

During the decision-making process, customers are influenced by factors such as their perception of value, the ease of purchasing, and their overall experience with the brand. To ensure a smooth transition through the sales funnel, conversion optimization is crucial in addressing any potential barriers or hesitations. It’s important to create a seamless omnichannel experience, as users expect a personalized journey across various touchpoints, ultimately resulting in a successful purchase.

Post-Purchase

The post-purchase stage focuses on order fulfillment, customer satisfaction, and the opportunities to foster customer loyalty through a seamless post-purchase experience .

This stage plays a crucial role in shaping customers’ perceptions about a brand.

Efficient order fulfillment, timely delivery, and product quality are crucial factors influencing customer satisfaction post-purchase.

Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) help in gauging customers’ experiences and their likelihood to recommend the brand to others.

To enhance customer loyalty, businesses can implement personalized post-purchase engagement strategies, including targeted offers, loyalty programs, and proactive customer support, aiming to provide added value and build long-term relationships with customers.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Ecommerce?

Creating a customer journey map for ecommerce involves the strategic use of user personas, customer segmentation, and data-driven insights to map out the user’s interactions and experiences from discovery to post-purchase engagement.

The first step in optimizing user experience is to identify and develop user personas. These personas represent the diverse behaviors, needs, and preferences of different customer segments.

By understanding the unique motivations of each segment, businesses can tailor their strategies to address specific pain points and provide personalized experiences. Customer segmentation is crucial in this process, as it allows businesses to group customers based on common characteristics and behaviors.

With data-driven decisions, businesses can refine their customer journey maps to ensure that every touchpoint is optimized to meet the evolving needs of their audience.

Define Your Target Audience

Defining the target audience for the customer journey map involves conducting thorough user research, understanding customer preferences, and identifying the key demographic and psychographic characteristics that influence the user’s interaction with the ecommerce platform.

This process delves into understanding user behavior patterns, such as their browsing habits, purchasing decisions, and response to marketing strategies.

By analyzing customer preferences and gaining insights into their needs and motivations, businesses can tailor their offerings to better match the expectations of their target audience.

Identifying key demographics allows for personalized messaging and a more effective customer journey, ultimately leading to increased engagement and conversion rates.

Identify Touchpoints

Identifying touchpoints involves analyzing user interaction, website navigation, and customer touchpoints across various channels to pinpoint the critical moments that shape the customer’s journey.

This process is integral in understanding how users engage with a website or interface, as it sheds light on their behaviors and preferences.

Effective website navigation is crucial for providing a seamless user experience, ensuring that visitors can find what they need quickly and easily.

Delving into customer touchpoints allows businesses to identify key interactions that influence purchasing decisions, enabling them to optimize these touchpoints to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Map Out the Customer Journey

Mapping out the customer journey involves visualizing the user’s interactions, emphasizing user engagement, satisfaction, and the optimization of touchpoints to enhance the overall ecommerce experience.

This process starts with a deep understanding of the user’s actions and behaviors at each stage of their journey. By analyzing these touchpoints, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Utilizing customer journey mapping methodology, businesses strategize to optimize user experience, aiming to create a seamless and satisfying interaction. User engagement and satisfaction become the focal points, guiding the refinement of touchpoints to ensure a positive and memorable journey for the consumer. This strategic optimization ultimately leads to stronger brand loyalty and customer retention .

Common Challenges in Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping

Ecommerce customer journey mapping encounters common challenges such as data analysis limitations, difficulties in identifying touchpoints, and the need for alignment between cross-functional teams to ensure comprehensive mapping and optimization.

This dynamic landscape means that companies need to adopt a data-driven approach that encompasses all stages of the customer journey.

Understanding the touchpoints across channels and devices is vital for creating a seamless experience .

Team alignment is essential to ensure that every touchpoint is optimized, and customer data is utilized effectively to make informed decisions.

Lack of Data

One of the primary challenges in ecommerce customer journey mapping is the lack of comprehensive and actionable data, including user feedback, purchase behavior, and interaction patterns required for insightful mapping.

This data scarcity can hinder businesses from fully understanding their customers’ preferences, needs, and pain points. Without robust user feedback, it becomes challenging to capture the real-time sentiments of customers and tailor the journey mapping accordingly.

Similarly, without in-depth purchase behavior analysis, businesses may miss out on opportunities to optimize the customer journey, enhance satisfaction, and drive conversions. Data-driven insights play a crucial role in bridging this gap, enabling businesses to make informed decisions based on the actual patterns and trends observed in customer interactions.

Inaccurate or Outdated Data

The presence of inaccurate or outdated data poses a significant obstacle in ecommerce customer journey mapping, impacting the reliability and integrity of the insights derived from the mapping process.

This challenge hampers the ability of businesses to make informed, data-driven decisions crucial for creating personalized customer experiences.

Data accuracy is fundamental for understanding customer behavior, preferences, and pain points, which forms the backbone of effective journey mapping.

To address this issue, companies need rigorous data validation processes, regular data audits, and investments in advanced customer journey mapping tools that can filter out inaccurate data and provide real-time insights for a more accurate understanding of the customer journey.

Difficulty in Identifying Touchpoints

Identifying effective touchpoints across the user’s omnichannel experience presents a notable challenge in ecommerce customer journey mapping due to the complexity of user interaction and the diverse paths taken by customers during their journey.

This challenge becomes even more intricate as customers engage with businesses through various digital and physical channels, including websites, social media, mobile apps, and in-person interactions.

The dynamic nature of user preferences and behaviors adds another layer of complexity, making it essential for businesses to adopt strategies that enable them to capture and optimize touchpoints effectively. By leveraging technologies such as data analytics and machine learning , businesses can gain insights into customer touchpoints, allowing them to tailor their omnichannel experiences and enhance customer satisfaction .

Lack of Alignment between Teams

The absence of alignment between cross-functional teams can hinder the cohesive mapping and optimization of the ecommerce customer journey, underscoring the need for collaborative efforts and unified strategies across departments.

This challenge often arises when different departments focus solely on their individual objectives, leading to fragmented customer touchpoints and inconsistent experiences.

To overcome this, it’s crucial for teams to align around a common understanding of the customer journey, recognizing how each touchpoint impacts the overall experience.

By fostering open communication, establishing shared objectives, and integrating cross-functional collaboration into the customer journey mapping process, organizations can achieve synergy and deliver a seamless experience that meets customer expectations at every interaction.

Tips for a Successful Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

Achieving a successful ecommerce customer journey map relies on continuous data gathering and analysis, cross-departmental involvement, and regular review and updating of the map to accommodate evolving customer behaviors and touchpoints.

To develop a comprehensive understanding of customer preferences and pain points, it is crucial to gather and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data from various touchpoints and interactions. This requires close collaboration among different teams, including marketing, sales, and customer service . By continuously reviewing and updating the customer journey map, incorporating ongoing data insights and adapting to changing customer behaviors, businesses can improve their customer retention strategies and optimize their user interface design.

Continuously Gather and Analyze Data

Continuous data gathering and analysis are imperative for maintaining an informed and adaptive customer journey map, enabling data-driven decisions and insights into evolving user behavior and preferences.

This ongoing process allows businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences. It helps to identify patterns and trends in user behavior, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

By utilizing digital experience data , companies can tailor their strategies to accommodate changing customer needs and enhance the overall user experience. Continuous data gathering and analysis provide valuable insights that enable businesses to make informed decisions.

Involve All Teams and Departments

Involving all teams and departments, including customer support , marketing , and user experience , is crucial for comprehensive insights and effective collaboration in crafting and optimizing the ecommerce customer journey map.

This inclusive approach not only allows for a holistic understanding of the customer journey but also ensures that all touchpoints are optimized for a seamless user experience.

Customer support, being at the forefront of interacting with customers, provides valuable insights into pain points and areas for improvement. By aligning diverse teams such as marketing, user engagement, and product development, businesses can create a unified strategy to enhance the customer journey map, ensuring that it is user-centric and effectively addresses customer needs and expectations.

Regularly Review and Update the Map

Regular review and updates of the customer journey map are essential to adapt to changing customer interactions, emerging ecommerce trends, and evolving touchpoints. This ensures the map remains reflective of the current customer journey landscape.

Businesses can optimize their online shopping experience by regularly revisiting and revising their customer journey map. This allows for alignment with changing customer behaviors and the identification and optimization of touchpoints. By implementing strategies for improved engagement and loyalty, businesses can see increased conversion rates and growth. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to stay proactive in reviewing and updating their customer journey map in the constantly evolving ecommerce landscape.

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The eCommerce customer journey and how to map it

Think about the last purchase you made.

How long did it take you to click ‘buy’? How many different sites, ads, emails, and stores did you check out before finally fetching your wallet?

Suffice to say that the typical buyer journey is anything but linear. Few shoppers convert right away, and every brand is challenged with adjusting their eCommerce marketing strategy to anticipate buyer movements both online and offline.

So, what can you do to stay ahead? Let’s talk more about what the eCommerce customer journey entails, and how to map your customer’s path to purchase when starting your business .

What is the eCommerce customer journey?

5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey, what factors affect the customer journey, customer journey mapping: why it’s a must, how to map the buyer journey for your business, example of a journey map.

Every so often, a buyer will take a relatively straight path to purchase. They'll search for a product, find your item, and within the same sitting, they'll complete the purchase.

But much more often, customers will be “pinballed” between various touchpoints. They’ll see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads in a day as they’re scrolling through their phones, checking their emails, or listening to Spotify. Then, once they decide to do some shopping, they’ll likely hop between Amazon, your site, and a competitor’s shop.

The eCommerce customer journey is the sum of all of these interactions (see our guide on what is eCommerce ). It begins with the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand to when he or she finally makes a purchase.

Some buyers will convert within mere days—while others may take several months or years. Tipping the scale towards the former outcome will require understanding the core stages and touchpoints of the customer journey and knowing how to make the best impact on your buyers.

Your customers’ overall journey can be broken down into five key stages.

01. Awareness

Your customer stumbles across your brand for the first time. Be it through an ad, social media, word of mouth, or SEO–they are now aware of your products. However, as noted earlier, many will not convert right away. Some may not even be looking to purchase anything at all.

At this stage, you’ll want to make sure you understand how people are finding your brand and who they are. Are they the buyer personas you expected to reach? How do demographics, acquisition source, and other factors affect what action your audience takes next?

While many visitors at this stage may just be “window browsing,” you’ve at least built some sort of brand recognition. Now it’s time to do something with it: retarget people, learn more about their interests, and guide them towards products that are most relevant to them.

02. Consideration

At this point, your buyer shows actual interest in your product. They’ve got their eyes on a particular product or set of products, and are deciding which one is worth buying.

Some may be trying to decide whether your item is a need versus a want. Others may be checking out product specs to make sure that your item is worth the price. Still others may be deal hunting or checking out options on competitive sites.

In any case, you’ll want to track which product pages people are spending the most time on, which products they’re comparing, and what other brands are on their radar. How can you convince them that your product is better? What can you do to build their confidence in your brand or incentivize a purchase?

03. Decision

Alas, your buyer makes a purchase on your site—assuming that the checkout process is easy and buyer friendly.

Your number one goal here is to make sure that the checkout process is seamless. Create a simple checkout flow, offer multiple (and secure) payment options, communicate your return policy, and provide all the information buyers need to feel supported by your brand.

Buyers should know when to expect their packages and any fees associated with their purchase. Don’t let any unwelcome surprises or lack of information lead to customers canceling their orders early.

04. Retention

Once a buyer makes their first purchase with your brand, they’ll ideally become a repeat customer . A positive customer experience—including excellent customer service, on-time delivery, and a multichannel marketing strategy—can work together to build customer loyalty .

Note that even though you’ve won the first sale, you’ll need to continuously earn a buyer’s patronage time and time again. Be consistent in your messaging. Engage buyers frequently. Offer incentives or employ strategies for upselling and cross-selling .

05. Advocacy

Happy customers have the potential to attract other happy customers. Buyers at this final leg of the customer journey are (hopefully) so happy with your product and/or service that they’re eager to spread the word to their friends and family.

Of course, this isn’t a passive activity. You’ll want to proactively nurture brand ambassadors by creating a customer loyalty program , hosting giveaways, showing appreciation, and taking other steps to inspire advocacy.

Your customers are a moving target. Between their unique preferences and backgrounds—plus their prior experiences with brands—there are tons of factors that shape the way they make their purchases.

As you track the various ways that customers interact with your brand, consider how trends like the ones below can make a big impact on the buyer journey.

Social and economic changes - e.g., the recent pandemic. These events tend to spur shifts in buying behaviors and expectations, as many types of businesses and buyers alike adapt to new realities. With each shift, consumers tend to get smarter and potentially pickier on what defines a good value and how to spend their money.

Convergence of online and offline shopping - Omnichannel retail isn’t just a concept anymore. Today, the lines between the offline and online worlds are increasingly blurred—with digital native brands like Warby Parker opening physical showrooms, and longtime retailers like T.J. Maxx investing more in online commerce. Curbside pickup, BOPIS, and in-store returns are just the beginning of what’s to come; brands should expect the customer journey to entail a greater mix of online and offline touchpoints, regardless of whether a customer originated online or not.

Corporate responsibility - Brands today are expected to do good. Inactivity or a difference in values could shape a customer’s engagement with your brand at any point of the buyer’s journey.

Choice paralysis - The proliferation of brands and products online have the ability to frustrate consumers. Make sure that your website is organized in such a way that customers know exactly where to find what they’re looking for. Make it easier for them to filter out noise and/or compare similar options. The last thing you want is for an overabundance of options—or poor site design—to deter your customers from buying. Learn more about combatting choice paralysis .

While customer journey mapping is an imperfect science, the benefits are undeniable.

In fact, 30% of surveyed retailers reported significant improvements in customer lifetime value and customer advocacy after investing in digital customer experience (CX). Roughly 23% reported an increase in average order size as well.

This exercise can help you to achieve multiple goal including:

Getting more clarity over how buyers interact with you - By carefully mapping your customer journey, you can gain a clear understanding of your buyers and their habits. A map helps you to see things from the buyer's perspective rather than your business’s perspective.

Improving customer retention rates - A map helps you to identify when and why prospective buyers are dropping. For example, an ill-worded message or one displayed in the wrong place at the wrong time could be all that’s causing buyers to regress in their journey. By making strategic changes and reducing friction in the customer experience, you can enjoy an easier time attracting and retaining buyers.

Sharpening your focus and organization - This exercise will force you to lay everything on the table–from all of your marketing campaigns to all the possible interactions a customer may have with your brand. From there, you can determine the health of each channel, who owns which touchpoint, and realistic goals for each event.

Increasing revenue - When you understand how buyers interact with your business in detail, you can more accurately cater your communications, offers, content, and promotions to influence sales. It’s all too easy to rely on assumptions or old habits when engaging customers. A journey map helps to shed light on biases and pain points that you may not have known were there before.

So how do you actually map the customer journey? Here are five steps to get you started.

Step 1. Describe your buyer personas

Before building a map, you must clearly define your target customer types. Are you looking to engage parents, young adults, or consumers with specific hobbies?

Your personas should include as much detail as possible. Make sure to base them around real data—not made-up, fake, or idealistic data. Talk to various stakeholders, interview your customers, consult social media, or perform user testing.

In other words, don't build a buyer profile based on what you think a customer should look like. Create your buyer personas using actual data you gathered from the places where they hang out and from talking directly to your target audience.

Step 2. Define the main character of your map

Now, you can decide which set of customers you’d like to analyze as part of the journey mapping process. The map will look different for each type of buyer you target, and trying to address all of them at once will only muddy the data.

To start, pick the most common persona (i.e., the most valuable or largest cohort). You’ll have an easier time collecting data this way, plus taking meaningful action from your journey map.

Step 3. Analyze on-site behaviors

As an initial step, check out the behaviors on your website and jot down the top pages that people enter your site from, where they exit or bounce, and which ones are the highest converting. Tools like Google Analytics and Wix Analytics can help to fill in these blanks.

To get more specific, make sure to filter your data according to criteria that’s most relevant to your buyer persona: geo, new versus returning users, and device (to name a few).

You may already start to see areas where people drop off and opportunities to optimize your site. You can additionally gain insight into what your buyer is more interested in buying based on where they linger on your site (though note that this could be heavily influenced by how accessible a page is from other areas of your site).

Step 4. List all other customer touchpoints

List out all the ways that your target buyer can interact with your company, both on and off your site. Include things like:

Social media

Review sites

Publications

Popup stores

Onsite banners

Physical stores

Marketplaces that you sell on

Help center

Loyalty program

Seasonal promotions

From here, you’ll want to list out all the possible actions someone could take from each channel. For instance, when someone interacts with a blog, he or she may subscribe to your newsletter, download a piece of content that you promote, click to another blog—or even request a demo. Alternatively, your visitor may bounce.

The purpose of this exercise is to audit all the CTAs you include on a single page, as well as links and other messaging that may influence a visitor’s behaviors. You’ll moreover want to look into whether reality aligns with expectations.

When you compare your list of expected behaviors with the data you gathered from Google Analytics, Wix Analytics, and other sources—do the results align? How can you better define the purpose of each channel, and match your goals with a visitor intent?

Step 5. Visualize the journey

Finally, you can document all of your findings into one easy-to-reference map. The scope of your journey map can vary depending on your goal. For instance, you could show the complete customer journey (as shown below) or hone in on just a part of it where you see the most room for improvement.

A map may cover everything from a buyer’s emotions, to their actions, to roles and responsibilities on your team at each stage. It can serve as both a tool for predicting buyer behaviors and keeping your team organized.

That said, there are several types of journey maps you can create:

Current state map - This shows how customers interact with your brand today. You could use it to compare behaviors between two different segments of buyers, or to uncover how customer emotions and behaviors vary depending on how they find your products (as an example).

Future state map - This illustrates the ideal journey that you want your customers to take. It helps your team rally around specific goals and identify critical points of a customer’s journey.

Day in the life map - This is similar to a current state map, except that it doesn’t start and end with a buyers’ interaction with your brand. It aims to understand all of their daily activities and lifestyles, with the goal of developing new, meaningful touchpoints.

Service blueprints - This takes a simplified version of one of the maps above, then adds in details about the various people, technologies, and processes that take place behind the scenes. The purpose is to audit and optimize how your team functions in the background to support the customer journey.

Let’s imagine that you own an online shop for pet supplies. You want to create a current state map in order to see how your core customers (new dog owners) are interacting with your brand. Your map may look something like this.

This helps your team keep track of the most effective campaigns, products, and channels. You’ll likely look to expand upon this map soon, as you get even more granular in your research or launch new campaigns.

There is no right or wrong way to create an eCommerce journey map. The framework outlined here is just meant to provide a good starting point. Once you have a baseline, you can continue to modify and rework your journey map to fit your unique business.

Remember that the customer journey is constantly evolving. Re-evaluate your eCommerce journey map once a quarter or at least once every six months. Aim to reduce friction in the customer journey and put assumptions to the test.

Allison Lee

Editor, Wix eCommerce

Allison is the editor for the Wix eCommerce blog, with several years of experience reporting on eCommerce news, strategies, and founder stories.

• Sell Online

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How to Map a Customer Journey

April 25, 2023 • armando roggio.

An ecommerce customer journey map shows the path of buyers leading to an online purchase. Analyzing those journeys helps merchants understand how shoppers find the site, what they do on it, and what they want to achieve at each step.

Imagine a visitor to an online store looking for a new pair of shoes. The journey map would show everything he does — searching for shoes, reading reviews, adding a pair of Nikes to the cart, and checking out. The map might also show the shopper’s emotional state at each step or phase, such as excitement when he finds the perfect running shoes or frustration if the website is confusing.

Creating this sort of map — often on a spreadsheet — helps ecommerce marketers discover what makes customers happy and what problems they face while shopping. It’s an opportunity to improve the buying experience and thus generate more conversions.

To build an ecommerce customer journey map, start with four regions:

• Before the purchase,
• During the purchase,
• After the purchase,
• Reengagement.

Create these regions on a spreadsheet or a specialized tool such as Figma. Under each region, add the stages a shopper might go through.

Four regions of a customer journey map are common for ecommerce businesses.

Next, consider the stages a shopper might go through for each region. These stages could differ for every business, but there are some commonalities.

In the “Before Purchase” region, a shopper likely:

• Discovers or recognizes a need,
• Becomes aware of the product,
• Researches and evaluates a product,
• Considers potential merchants.

Think through these steps and add them to your customer journey map.

In an ecommerce customer journey map, stages are under regions and represent the shopper’s mindset.

Touchpoints

Next, identify touchpoints in each stage of customers’ journeys. Example touchpoints include ads and content marketing. Some touchpoints are beyond a merchant’s control, such as medical devices from a physician’s diagnosis.

Touchpoints occur in various combinations and may be repeated. A prospect could see an ad before she realizes the need for the product.

Touchpoints are shoppers’ interactions with a company, its products, or its industry.

The Questions

In the context of each touchpoint, ask a series of questions about the shopper. Answering these questions should provide insights into improving the customer journey.

• What is the shopper doing?
• What is the shopper trying to accomplish?
• Where is the action taking place?
• What is the shopper thinking or feeling?
• How will we move the buyer along the journey with our store or product in mind?

For each touchpoint, develop a series of questions.

Let’s consider each of these questions in turn.

What is the shopper doing? At each touchpoint, consider shoppers’ actions. Is the shopper browsing products, reading reviews, interacting with ads, or watching a product demo video? From this behavior, identify the best ways to engage and improve the buying experience.

What is the shopper trying to accomplish? Think about the shopper’s motivations for each touchpoint. Is she trying to learn about a product, compare options, find the best deal, or obtain support? Understanding those objectives will help meet prospects’ needs and expectations.

Where is the action taking place? Identify where the touchpoint occurs, such as the online store, social media, email , or search engines. Knowing where the interaction takes place can help optimize the experience and ensure a consistent and seamless journey across channels.

What is the shopper thinking? At each touchpoint, consider the shopper’s thoughts. Is he excited about a new product, frustrated by a complicated checkout , or confused about a promotion? Understanding shoppers’ thoughts can identify pain points or negative emotions.

How will we move the buyer along the journey with our store or product in mind? For each touchpoint, think about how to guide the shopper to the next stage of the journey. This may involve providing helpful information, personalized recommendations, or exceptional customer support. Proactively addressing shoppers’ needs increases the likelihood of conversion and long-term loyalty.

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Copyright © 2005 - 2024. Practical Ecommerce® is a registered trademark of Confluence Distribution, Inc.

Create an e-commerce customer journey map with a free tool

Customer journey mapping in e-commerce is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your online business. It starts when they first become aware of your products, to completing a purchase. It can extend to after-purchase care.

Buying and selling products on the internet is as popular as ever. There are many small and medium sized businesses entering online shopping space thanks to popular e-commerce sites like Shopify or BigCommerce. If they want to build up their market share and not lose out, they need to ensure smooth customer experience.

It all boils down to one thing—

Mapping e-commerce customer journey.

It lets you understand customer's complex interactions with your brand and meet their needs.

This article covers the following topics:

• Why journey mapping for our e-commerce is important?
• Creating an e-commerce journey map with examples
• Online shopping challenges and how to solve them
• Bonus: e-commerce journey template

Why is journey mapping in e-commerce important?

Designing a customer journey map in e-commerce is key to:

• Understand customer interactions across different touchpoints (ads, newsletter, T&Cs, customer support, and many more)
• Identify customer's pain points
• Improve satisfaction scores and increase the number of returnig customers
• Improve existing operations based on concrete data
• Identify potential new target groups
• Strategize how to reach customers in the future

Sounds good?

Let's see where to start!

How to create an e-commerce customer journey map?

At Smaply, we know the ropes of making customer journey map . So even if you have never done this before, we'll guide you through the process. You can even use Smaply's free customer journey mapping software with our tips and tricks to speed the process up.

1. Empathize with customer personas

There is no customer journey map without a customer. So you have to think about who our customer is—or should be to understand their needs and expectations.

The first step is to create a persona that represents this target group in a customer-centric way. Defining a persona in e-commerce can help you answer some important questions:

• What does the user need/want?
• What channels and devices does the persona use in order to research products?
• How price-sensitive is the user?
• What are their concrete expectations about their online shopping experience?
• What products does the persona value?

By answering these questions, you can get a better understanding of your target group. The questions above are just examples. You could also include country specific questions or cultural differences. Just think about which information might be helpful for their e-commerce journey.

Check out the example profile of a persona in a customer journey map for an online shop.

Keep in mind that when you run an online shop, you should also examine potential customers or leads.

2. Define the scope of the e-commerce journey map

When creating a journey map, you can choose between various scales and scopes.

When you start out, we recommend that you use a high-level journey map to visualize the whole experience the user has with your brand. From finding to your e-commerce site, searching for the right product, the check-out process, and up until the product delivery.

Then, you can create a more detailed map to dive deeper into a specific step. For example, you might want to focus on the product search on your website through different category pages or the check-out funnel.

Many e-commerce shops lose customers during the check-out process. It might be useful to investigate this step. Is the process intuitive? Or is it confusing for customers?

3. Analyze experiences, step by step, stage by stage

Now, we have to map down the user’s journey.

Every e-commerce journey map consists of several stages and steps:

Once we’ve defined the stages, think about the different steps and touchpoints customers experience when they are interacting with your online shop. The level of detail of each step depends on the overall scale of the map that we’ve defined above. Ask yourself:

• What are the steps within each stage?
• What are the customers’ goals and pain points at each step of the journey?
• What are your own business goals for each step?
• Where do your current customers drop out of the journey, leave our website?
• Do they get the right information at the right time?

There's one important thing to keep in mind at this point—

The customer journey starts before users get to our website. It starts with a need, a desire for a more or less specific product. Also, the customer's e-commerce journey does't end at the checkout. Nor when users hold the product in their hands.

Customers experience and interact with your brand after completing the online purchase. For example, when contacting support, returning to your shop, or recommending the brand to their social network.

5. Visualizing processes

This is an often neglected step in mapping e-commerce journeys.

You can also focus on the backstage activities happening during the journey. What needs to happen behind the scene, outside of the customers’ view to deliver a smooth experience? Close to a service blueprint, visualizing different levels of processes helps webiste owners better understand who’s involved at what step of an experience and who is responsible for their optimization.

In the below map you can see a strong focus on enabling processes could look like.

For comprehensive and complex journey maps with advanced lane and content types like those above, use a digital customer journey mapping software .

Examples of journey maps in e-commerce

This simple e-commerce journey map illustrates the steps of two different personas and compares their experience. It visualizes:

• Channels they use
• Their emotions
• Involvement (dramatic arc)
• Ideas for improvement
• Backstage lane that provides a rough idea of  the processes that are invisible to the customer

This example of online shopping experience map shows a strong focus on backstage processes. It clearly differentiates between processes that are visible to the customers, and processes that aren’t. Hence, it gets very close to a service blueprint.

What are the challenges of mapping journeys in e-commerce?

Getting lost in all the data.

In e-commerce, it is common to collect loads of data about users, their preferences, purchase history, and needs. It can be extremely useful and help get a better and more holistic understanding of your customers. However, using all this data too early in the process of mapping e-commerce journeys can prevent you from understanding of the big picture.

Quantitative data (e.g., from Google Analytics) is a good resource for sure, but remember to look at qualitative data, too. For example, try to interview some of your customers after the purchase or send them a customer survey to get some qualitative insights.

The good thing about qualitative data is that it helps us find the biggest pain points easily. If there’s a hole in the street and three pedestrians point to it, we don’t need another 10 folks to confirm this, right?

Also, quantitative data will never give you an answer to the “why”:

• Why did users visit your page?
• Why did they buy from your site, and not another?
• Why did they abandon the cart?

Some more questions that could be interesting to dive into are:

• How did they research the product in the first place?
• What online and offline channels did they use?
• How do they evaluate the experience on our website?
• How do our users think your page could be improved?

Consider context and think cross-channel

Many different channels influence the e-commerce journey: website, shopping app, review portals and word of mouth…

Even though a big part of a service is being used in an online context, it does not mean customers don’t have any offline experiences. Consider physical context and direct, personal interaction! Is your online shop accessible to everyone? What do customer reviews tell others about your customer service? This is something you will  learn from Google Analytics!

Empty template for an e-commerce journey map

It’s time to create your own journey map!

Download this set of paper templates , or start creating digital journey maps with Smaply !

Create user-focused journey maps to understand the user experience and innovate your services. Smaply lets you easily create e-commerce journey maps, personas, and ecosystem maps with an in-app template.

Sign up now, it's free!

Antonia Cramer

Antonia keeps her eyes open for questions people interested in service design are looking to answer, and helps us provide resources to support their learning ambitions. With her background in digital communication she has great knowledge on how to create content that is easy to access and understand.

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E-commerce customer journey map: Understanding the path to success

In this article, we’ll explore e-commerce customer journey mapping, discuss it’s benefits, key components, and practical uses.

• August 29, 2023

In the world of ecommerce, understanding the customer journey is paramount to achieving success.

A customer journey map is a powerful tool that allows businesses to visualize and analyze the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with their brand throughout the entire purchasing process.

By gaining insights into the customer’s perspective, businesses can optimize their strategies and enhance the overall shopping experience.

In this article, we will delve into the concept of customer journey mapping in ecommerce, exploring its benefits, key components, and practical applications.

1. The significance of customer journey mapping

In the highly competitive world of ecommerce, businesses need to go beyond simply attracting customers to their websites. They must strive to create exceptional experiences that build trust, foster loyalty, and drive conversions.

This is where customer journey mapping comes into play. It provides a holistic view of the customer’s interactions, preferences, and pain points throughout their purchasing journey.

2. Understanding the customer journey

The customer journey encompasses every step a buyer takes, from the initial awareness of a product or brand to the final purchase and beyond.

It involves multiple touchpoints, such as website visits, product searches, social media engagement, email communications, and customer support interactions.

Understanding the customer journey is crucial for identifying opportunities for improvement and optimizing each interaction along the way.

3. The key elements of a customer journey map

A customer journey map typically includes the following key elements:

• Persona Identification: Creating buyer personas helps businesses understand their target audience and tailor their strategies accordingly.
• Touchpoints: Identifying and analyzing the various touchpoints a customer encounters, both online and offline, provides insights into their interactions and preferences.
• Customer Goals: Understanding the goals and motivations of customers at each stage of their journey helps businesses align their offerings and messaging effectively.
• Pain Points: Recognizing the challenges and frustrations customers face during their journey enables businesses to address and resolve them proactively.
• Emotion and Experience: Evaluating the emotions and overall experience of customers at different touchpoints helps businesses create more meaningful and engaging interactions.

4. Creating a customer journey map

Creating a customer journey map involves several steps:

• Research: Collect data from various sources, such as customer surveys, analytics tools, social media monitoring, and customer support logs.
• Identify Touchpoints: Map out all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, including both online and offline channels.
• Plot the Journey: Plot the customer’s journey on a timeline, highlighting each touchpoint and the customer’s emotional state and experience.
• Validate and Refine: Seek feedback from customers and internal stakeholders to validate and refine the customer journey map.

5. Analyzing the Customer Journey Data

Once the customer journey map is created, it’s essential to analyze the data gathered to extract valuable insights. Here are some key steps for analyzing customer journey data:

• Identify Patterns: Look for patterns and trends within the data to understand common behaviors and preferences of customers throughout their journey.
• Identify Bottlenecks: Identify any bottlenecks or areas where customers are experiencing challenges or drop-offs in their journey. This can help you pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Measure Performance: Utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of different touchpoints and stages of the customer journey. This will help you identify areas of success and areas that need attention.
• Customer Segmentation: Segment your customers based on their behavior and preferences to gain a deeper understanding of different customer groups and tailor your strategies accordingly.
• Feedback Analysis: Pay attention to customer feedback, whether it’s through surveys, reviews, or social media comments. This feedback can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and areas for improvement.

6. Improving the customer experience

Armed with the insights gained from customer journey mapping and data analysis, businesses can now focus on improving the overall customer experience. Here are some strategies to consider:

• Streamline the Purchase Process: Simplify the checkout process, reduce friction points, and optimize the website for easy navigation.
• Personalization and Recommendations: Utilize customer data to provide personalized recommendations and tailored experiences that cater to individual preferences.
• Seamless Omnichannel Experience: Ensure a seamless experience across multiple channels, including desktop, mobile, and brick-and-mortar stores. Maintain consistency in messaging and branding.
• Proactive Customer Support: Offer excellent customer support through various channels, such as live chat, email, and phone, to address customer inquiries and concerns promptly.
• Continuous Optimization: Regularly monitor and analyze customer feedback and data to identify areas for improvement and implement iterative changes to enhance the customer journey.

A key goal of customer journey mapping is to improve conversion rates. Businesses can leverage various strategies and tools to optimize conversions.

One such tool is PayPro Global ( payproglobal.com ), a payment processing platform that offers secure and seamless payment solutions for e-commerce businesses.

By integrating PayPro Global into the checkout process, businesses can provide customers with a smooth and trustworthy payment experience, increasing the likelihood of completing a purchase.

7. Optimizing conversion rates

A key goal of customer journey mapping is to improve conversion rates. Here are some strategies to optimize conversions:

• Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Ensure that CTAs are visible, compelling, and guide customers towards the desired actions.
• Social Proof and Reviews: Display customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to build trust and credibility.
• A/B Testing: Conduct A/B testing to experiment with different elements, such as layouts, colors, and messaging, to determine the most effective conversion strategies.
• Optimize Landing Pages: Create targeted landing pages that align with specific customer segments and campaigns.
• Exit Intent Strategies: Implement exit intent pop-ups or offers to retain customers who are about to leave the website without making a purchase.

8. Personalization and tailored experiences

Personalization is a key driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here’s how to implement personalized experiences:

• Dynamic Content: Utilize dynamic content to tailor website messaging, product recommendations, and promotions based on individual customer preferences and behavior.
• Email Personalization: Craft personalized and relevant email campaigns based on customer segmentation, past purchases, and browsing history.
• Retargeting Ads: Implement retargeting ads that display products or offers based on customers’ previous interactions with your brand.
• Loyalty Programs: Develop loyalty programs that reward customers for their continued engagement and purchases.
• Customized Recommendations: Utilize AI algorithms to provide real-time recommendations based on customer behavior, preferences, and similar customer profiles.

9. Mobile optimization and responsive design

In today’s mobile-driven world, optimizing the customer journey for mobile devices is essential. Consider the following:

• Mobile-Friendly Design: Ensure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices, providing a seamless browsing experience.
• Mobile Payment Options: Offer various mobile payment options to simplify the checkout process on mobile devices, such as mobile wallets and one-click payment options.
• Mobile App Experience: If you have a mobile app, focus on creating a user-friendly and intuitive experience that enhances the customer journey.
• Fast Loading Speed: Optimize your website and app for fast loading speed on mobile devices to minimize bounce rates and improve user satisfaction.
• Mobile-Specific Campaigns: Develop targeted marketing campaigns that are designed specifically for mobile users, utilizing features such as push notifications and location-based offers.

10. Leveraging social media and influencer marketing

Social media plays a significant role in the customer journey. Consider the following strategies to leverage social media and influencer marketing:

• Engaging Content: Create compelling and shareable content that resonates with your target audience on social media platforms.
• Social Listening: Monitor social media conversations to understand customer sentiment, gather feedback, and identify opportunities for engagement.
• Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers in your industry to amplify your brand’s reach and credibility, leveraging their engaged audience.
• Social Advertising: Utilize social media advertising to target specific customer segments and drive traffic to your website or landing pages.
• Community Building: Foster a sense of community on social media by encouraging user-generated content, engaging in conversations, and providing valuable resources and support.

11. Enhancing customer support and engagement

Exceptional customer support and engagement are crucial for a positive customer journey. Consider the following strategies:

• Live Chat: Implement live chat support on your website to provide real-time assistance and address customer queries promptly.
• Self-Service Resources: Develop a comprehensive knowledge base, FAQs, and tutorials that empower customers to find answers to their questions independently.
• Social Media Engagement: Actively engage with customers on social media by responding to comments, messages, and reviews in a timely and helpful manner.
• Personalized Communication: Use customer data to personalize communication channels, such as email, to deliver relevant and timely messages.
• Proactive Support: Anticipate customer needs and reach out proactively to provide support, product recommendations, or exclusive offers.

12. Measuring success: Key performance indicators (KPIs)

To assess the effectiveness of your customer journey strategies, monitor key performance indicators. Here are some essential KPIs to track:

• Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: Gather feedback from customers to measure their satisfaction with the overall experience and specific touchpoints.
• Average Order Value (AOV): Track the average value of each customer’s purchase to gauge the effectiveness of upselling and cross-selling strategies.
• Customer Retention Rate: Measure the percentage of customers who continue to make purchases and remain engaged with your brand over time.
• Return on Investment ( ROI ): Evaluate the financial impact of your customer journey initiatives by comparing the cost of implementation to the revenue generated.

13. Integrating customer journey mapping into business strategies

Customer journey mapping should be an integral part of your overall business strategies. Consider the following steps for integration:

• Cross-functional collaboration: Involve stakeholders from various departments, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.
• Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that customer journey initiatives align with your broader business objectives and contribute to the overall growth and success of the organization.
• Regular Reviews and Updates: Continuously review and update your customer journey map as customer preferences and market dynamics evolve.
• Training and Awareness: Provide training and awareness programs to employees across different departments to foster a customer-centric mindset and understanding of the customer journey.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Utilize the insights gathered from customer journey mapping and data analysis to make informed business decisions and prioritize areas for improvement.
• Continuous Improvement: Treat customer journey mapping as an ongoing process rather than a one-time activity. Continuously seek feedback, monitor performance, and make iterative changes to optimize the customer experience.

14. Case studies: Successful implementation of customer journey mapping

To gain a deeper understanding of the practical applications of customer journey mapping in ecommerce, let’s explore a few case studies:

• Company X: By analyzing their customer journey data, Company X identified a significant drop-off in the checkout process. They optimized their website’s user interface, streamlined the checkout steps, and implemented a progress indicator. As a result, they witnessed a 20% increase in conversion rates and improved customer satisfaction.
• Company Y: Through customer journey mapping, Company Y discovered that their customers faced difficulties finding relevant product recommendations. They personalized their website’s recommendation engine based on browsing history and purchase behavior. This led to a 15% increase in average order value and improved customer engagement.
• Company Z: By integrating customer journey mapping into their business strategies, Company Z identified that their customers were experiencing long response times in customer support. They implemented a chatbot and improved their support ticketing system, resulting in a 30% decrease in response times and increased customer loyalty.

These case studies highlight the effectiveness of customer journey mapping in driving tangible business outcomes and enhancing the overall customer experience.

15. Conclusion

Understanding the customer journey is vital for ecommerce success. Customer journey mapping allows businesses to gain valuable insights into customer interactions, pain points, and preferences throughout their buying journey.

By analyzing the data and implementing strategies to improve the customer experience, businesses can optimize conversion rates, personalize interactions, and enhance customer loyalty.

Remember, customer journey mapping is an iterative process that requires continuous monitoring, analysis, and refinement to stay aligned with evolving customer needs and expectations.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is customer journey mapping .

Customer journey mapping is a process of visualizing and analyzing the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a brand throughout their purchasing journey.

Why is customer journey mapping important in ecommerce? 

Customer journey mapping helps businesses understand the customer’s perspective, optimize strategies, and enhance the shopping experience, leading to increased conversions and customer satisfaction.

How can businesses create a customer journey map? 

Businesses can create a customer journey map by conducting research, identifying touchpoints, plotting the customer’s journey, and validating and refining the map based on feedback.

What are some key components of a customer journey map? 

Key components of a customer journey map include persona identification, touchpoints analysis, customer goals, pain points identification, and evaluating emotion and experience.

How can businesses optimize the customer journey? 

Businesses can optimize the customer journey by improving the overall customer experience, optimizing conversion rates, personalizing interactions, and leveraging social media and influencer marketing.

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How to map the ecommerce customer journey.

10 min read Here’s how to create ecommerce experiences customers will love you for.

We’ve written previously about customer journeys and how they add value to your CX program. Today we’ll focus on mapping customer journeys in ecommerce businesses, and cover some of the things you need to consider when you start this task.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is made up of the steps a customer takes in completing a task, whether it’s making a purchase, booking a service or figuring out how to solve a problem with the help of your customer services. These steps, known as touchpoints , work together to create an overall experience which can be positive, negative or neutral.

Customer journeys typically involve multiple channels and platforms and can go on over days, weeks or even months, depending on the nature of your business. Touchpoints can be business-owned, such as your website and marketing, or third-party, such as reviews and referrals.

It’s worth noting that a consumer journey (ecommerce or otherwise) isn’t within a company’s control. Customers create their own journeys, making their way between touchpoints as they seek to complete their tasks and meet their goals. A company’s role is to anticipate these goals and build an omni-channel environment that supports, rather than blocks them.

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Why map customer journeys?

When we think in terms of customer journeys, rather than individual interactions or tasks, we can start to bring the full customer experience into focus and understand how different parts of a business fit together to create it. This is a crucial step in creating and maintaining positive customer experiences.

As McKinsey describes , It’s possible for a business to have every touchpoint performing well but still experience high churn and low customer satisfaction. This is because the pathways and processes linking the touchpoints aren’t designed with user goals in mind, and the resulting customer journeys are frustrating, confusing and overly drawn-out. The puzzle pieces are optimised, but the way they fit together is not.

Customer journey mapping offers a number of benefits. It can

• Help you see important connections between different parts of your business (which from an internal perspective might seem quite separate)
• Understand the customer’s pain points within a journey and get insights on how to fix them
• Optimise the way individual touchpoints link together
• Appreciate the context of a customer’s touchpoints – for example, when they call your contact centre, they may already have interacted with your social media accounts and made an attempt to self-serve on your website

Journey mapping is very important for online retail. Customers on a digital platform don’t have the option to ask store staff for support or observe and learn from other customers as they would in a bricks and mortar store. The quality of their experience rests on services, flows and interfaces a business provides, and if these aren’t performing at their absolute best, customers may leave and not come back.

Customer journey stages

There may be a large number of touchpoints to consider when creating an ecommerce customer journey map. It can be helpful to categorise them into macro-level stages, such as:

1. Awareness

The customer learns who you are and what you have to offer. The touchpoints might include:

• advertising
• word-of-mouth recommendations
• media coverage
• social media
• search engines
• your website or app

2. Consideration

The customer has identified you as a possible solution to their needs. They are researching and comparing options. Touchpoints might include:

• review sites
• buyer’s guides (on your site or elsewhere)
• retargeting ads
• promotional emails
• your product pages
• your delivery, guarantee and returns pages

3. Decision

The customer has chosen you. They’ll now go through the process of making a purchase, including touchpoints like:

• adding items to a basket
• finding and using coupon or discount code
• third-party payment provider
• finance or buy-now-pay later application process
• confirmation and receipt

4. Service / ownership

After the transaction takes place, the customer moves on to touchpoints like:

• customer service and support
• feedback and reviews (on your site or elsewhere)
• returns and refunds process

These are just examples of touchpoints in a typical ecommerce customer journey. Every journey is different, and your customers may revisit stages, skip steps, drop out midway or jump between touchpoints in unpredictable ways.

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Drop-off points

Locating drop-off points is a key part of the ecommerce customer journey mapping exercise. Drop-off points, or drop-offs, are the times and places where a customer abandons their journey and fails to complete their task. Your ecommerce software data and your user experience feedback can work in tandem to tell you where the drop-offs are and what the customer is thinking and feeling at the point they decide to abandon their shopping cart during the decision phase or stop browsing product categories during consideration.

Buyer personas

As we’ve seen, customer journeys are complex. Mapping every possible ecommerce customer journey would take a long time and likely end up being prohibitively expensive. For many businesses, a better option is to identify the most valuable customer groups or segments and focus on optimising their typical journeys.

Creating a set of buyer personas for these high-value customers can help you gain a better understanding of their goals and behaviours so you can build ecommerce customer journey maps that are as intuitive and useful as possible.

Buyer personas are realistic but fictional characters that represent key segments of your audience. A persona might include images of the character, a biography and detailed descriptions of how they perceive and interact with your brand. It can also point to the character’s level of knowledge of your market, the kind of media they consume, their habits and their attitudes to shopping and retail.

You can use both qualitative and quantitative data to build up a picture of your key customer groups. Information like typical spend, length and frequency of website visits and product categories of interest, along with quotes from open-field feedback, can help illustrate a customer’s goals and motivations.

Customer and business goals

For each step along the ecommerce user journey there will be specific goals for both business and customers. Take time to think about and list out the total scope of possible user goals especially, as they’re likely to be diverse and detailed. The main and obvious one may be making a purchase, but there will be others that either support and feed into that goal or follow on from it. A customer’s goal might be to:

Educate themselves about a product category

Your site may help them learn about product features and benefits to help with purchase decisions – for example is a dishwasher equipped with a delay end timer feature, what is that and how does it help?

Use product information to eliminate concerns

A customer might come to your ecommerce platform with restrictions or objections that would rule out a product choice (e.g. a dress looks good but if it’s made from wool it’s not suitable as the recipient is allergic)

Understand where a product sits within a range

A customer might discover from your site that the item they have in mind is a mid-range option. Their goal might be to find out if there’s a cheaper one with fewer features, or if they can spend more to get a similar one that’s bigger or has a more attractive design.

Find out about finance options

Is buy-now-pay-later available, or could they pay in instalments?

Check and compare product guarantees

This might factor in at the consideration stage as the customer weighs up whether to buy from you or a competitor. Another store may offer the same product at the same price but with a longer or shorter guarantee period.

Returns policy

Like product guarantees, returns conditions could help a customer choose between you and a competitor.

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eCommerce Customer Journey Map: How to Create Top Customer Experiences

Mapping ecommerce customer journey: the bright vessel guide to perfect customer experiences.

Throughout two decades, the Internet has reached every side of our lives. And perhaps the most significant change has been in retail, which has had to adjust immensely. Now, each retailer is competing with the entire world’s worth of the same offering. It’s tough to get the attention of visitors, let alone turn them into customers. That’s why, these days, understanding the eCommerce customer journey is so essential.

There are countless websites out there offering roughly the same products as you. It’s difficult to get new visitors to stay and browse around, and it seems impossible to turn them into customers. That’s why understanding your visitors, their profile and what they’re craving, can make or break your eCommerce site.

So, the first question is: how do you stand out? And the answer is: creating an experience that only you can provide.

Sell Feelings and Experiences

Have you ever noticed that some brands don’t seem to sell any particular product, but rather a feeling associated with it? Coca-Cola might be the prime example of this: in each country they operate, their ads adjust to culture and situation. It’s one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and their actual product doesn’t require advertising. So, they sell a sort of Coca-Cola experience.

That’s the kind of thing you should be thinking of when building your retail brand online. Keep in mind:

• Experiences are products. You’re selling much more than an item: it’s one that can lead to a particular lifestyle.
• People share their experiences with products. With social media in our pockets, we’re all perpetually signed in.
• You can be an active participant in the market of experiences. Take advantage of the inspirational wave and create content around it. Be an active participant instead of trying to catch up.

Build a Great Relationship with your Customers

The only way to do that is by providing the best customer journey possible. You can do that by ensuring that the customer has the best experience shopping with you. Some of the factors for this are:

• That you provide the right items.
• That you have enough stock whenever customers look for something.
• That you have someone who can answer customer questions promptly. This goes from a call center to a chat to email: you should provide options.
• That you’ll act responsibly and quickly in case, customers need to return something.

Building an all-encompassing retail business that caters to every step of the eCommerce customer journey is nearly impossible. As a seller, need to be on top of many things and platforms. That’s why the best strategy is to find out who your customers are and how to care for them.

What’s an eCommerce Customer Journey Map?

We define as steps your customers or clients move through to engage with your company. The more your company interacts with customers; the more complicated this diagram can be. This also marks how necessary the map becomes, whether it’s an eCommerce store or brick-and-mortar.

What’s it for?

• Track-specific customer-company interactions.
• Check which sections of the process aren’t going smoothly.
• Create a more satisfying user experience.

Download an Example of a Customer Journey Here

Or see multiple examples in our post:   How to Build a Customer Journey Map with Example PDFs

Sales Funnel

As you may already know, there are three stages to purchase from the customer’s POV.

• Awareness: A person becomes aware of an existing product, and at some point decides to get one.
• Research: They look into different options, weighing in pros and cons.
• Purchase : They buy what appears like the best choice.
• Unboxing: This is a newer step and one most associated with technology. The out-of-the-box experience has become an important part of gadget-buying, and it’s basically a YouTube genre. Tech sellers can tap into those expectations by adding some flair to packaging.

Download an Example of a Marketing Map Here

Where to Channel your Attention

You want to “script” your customers’ experience as much as possible. This way, you’ll lead them towards an experience they’re likely to repeat. You should know what’s happening at each stage of your customer’s timeline. And this knowledge comes from hours of customer research, including observations and even interviews.

Here are a few tips to focus on during the process of finding out how your customers are behaving:

• Actions. What are your customers doing on each stage of purchase? How are they evolving to the next level?
• Motivations. Why are your customers acting the way they are? What’s their thought process and their emotional journey?
• Doubts. Is there anything keeping your customers from moving forward? These can come from uncertainties about the product, over-complicated jargon or any number of things. Perhaps an FAQ or an online chat to answer questions could be in order.
• Problems. Is there anything about your purchase process that’s less than friendly? Are there any barriers keeping your customers from reaching the next stage of the process?

You should schedule a monthly or quarterly meeting to adjust your eCommerce customer journey maps. Regularly, you need to ask yourself how you can be more helpful to your visitors on each step. What can you do to improve your visitors’ experience on your eCommerce site?

Creating Customer Personas

A customer persona “allows brands to better understand these homogenous groups, and to recognize key traits within them.” They focus on analyzing real customers, thus creating a more in-depth notion of how your customers think. And when you’re building this profile for the first time, it’s best to start small to avoid being overwhelmed.

The path to starting creating your buyer persona begins by interviewing your recent customers and interviewing them. Find who’s recently purchased something on your website and talk to them. What you need to find out here is:

• Why were they interested in the product they purchased?
• How did they find out more about the product? How and where did they research?
• What were the criteria behind choosing this specific product?
• Which competitor sites did they also evaluate?
• Why did they choose you instead of your competitors?
• What would they improve on the overall purchase experience?

Here is a free tool you can use to create your first customer persona. Go here .

This is a great start! The core of creating customer personas lies in the data you have so that you can build your eCommerce customer journey map from there. You can do this by:

1. Monitoring behavior flow

It’s essential to understand the way your visitors move around your eStore. Which pages are they visiting? Where are they clicking? How many of them are buying?

From your Google Analytics Behavior Flow report, you can find trends. Some of them include:

• Drop-off points where many users left the site after going through different pages. What’s happening in that specific point that drives visitors away?
• Page views. What page do visitors go after landing on your homepage?
• Which part of the funnel your customers are in. Are they viewing more blog entries? That can mean they’re finding out more about your product, building awareness!

By using your Behavior Flow report, you’ll get a better understanding of what your visitors do when on your site. Studying each stop can help you find where to focus to motivate visitors to become customers.

2. Analyzing the conversion path

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s of the utmost importance to have a presence in several channels. If you’re a small eCommerce store, you need to get your name and brand out there. It usually takes someone to see your brand or products on different platforms before deciding to become a customer.

Potential customers might find you through Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. They might later bounce back to another social network and look you up there. Then go back and forth on your page before actually making a purchase.

Through the Google Analytics Top Conversion Paths report, you can find out:

• Which path your visitors take. This includes entering your site from different channels.
• Which platforms are your visitors using to get to know your product.
• How visitors reached your site.

If you see that the majority of your influx comes from a specific social network, like Instagram, focus on it. Share content there that builds on your brand, showing what you’re about and the experience you’re selling.

3. Molding your eCommerce customer journey map to your specific needs

Now that you’re aware of who exactly is visiting your website, you need to adapt. What will ultimately set you apart from other similar sellers is your relationship with the customer. You need to understand your customers’ thought process, building a strong relationship with them. You want them to trust you, and find your eCommerce experience a pleasurable one.

With the data on your hands, you can understand why your customers act the way they do. Your job is then to offer just what they desire, from content to products.

Remember that:

• You can’t control when and if they purchase. Your visitors will become customers whenever they’re ready, and not before. You won’t entice them with a particular sale if they’re not there just yet. If you push too hard, you might draw them away.
• You depend on your eCommerce customer journey to know what content to place and where. Only after you see the way visitors act on your website can you test content on different sections. This can pave the way for the kind of content your visitors crave, from storytelling emails versus marketing campaigns.

You can do onsite testing and customization through platforms like Google Optimize or Nosto. Offsite, some apps include Shoelace and Klaviyo.

In Conclusion

What all this boils down to is quite simple: your primary focus should always be in how you relate to your customers. You need to understand who you’re selling to and what exactly do they require from you.

Psychologically understanding where they’re coming from is a big factor towards success. The way you respond to customer needs is a significant factor in whether they’ll remain loyal to your brand. Provide value at each stage of the eCommerce customer journey map, and you’re on your way to greatness! Bright Vessel provides eCommerce solutions for all types of businesses, with custom strategies for your specific industry. Contact us now to find out more!

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Improve your E-commerce Customer Journey using AI

Explore AI-powered e-commerce customer journey mapping, decoding stages, and crafting compelling strategies. Embrace Manifest AI to navigate complexities, personalize experiences, and build lasting customer relationships.

Welcome to the captivating world of e-commerce, where every click holds the potential to shape a customer's journey. In this ever-evolving landscape, understanding the intricate path customers take is both challenging and crucial for success. However, there is a game-changer that can make this task easier: artificial intelligence (AI)

Prepare to be amazed as we dive deep into the realm of AI-powered e-commerce customer journey mapping. Together, we'll unravel the mysteries of the customer journey stages, decode the differences between a marketing funnel and a customer journey map, unlock the secrets to crafting a compelling B2B & D2C customer journey map, and unveil strategies that will take your e-commerce customer journey to unprecedented heights.

Get ready for an exhilarating adventure where AI meets e-commerce, and the possibilities are boundless. Let's start with the importance of customer journey mapping:

Importance of Customer Journey Mapping

The importance of customer journey mapping can be highlighted through the following key points, based on numeric data and results:

• Gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, resulting in a significant increase in conversion rates by 30%.
• Identify pain points and areas for improvement within the customer journey, leading to a remarkable reduction in customer complaints by 40%.
• Enhance overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in an impressive 25% increase in customer retention rates.
• Effectively address customer needs and preferences, leading to a substantial decrease in bounce rate by 15%.
• Optimize marketing strategies by leveraging data-driven insights, resulting in a remarkable improvement of 20% in marketing campaign return on investment (ROI).

These data-backed points emphasize the significance of customer journey mapping in driving business growth and improving customer experiences.

Simplifying Customer Journey Using AI

With the advent of AI technology, businesses can now enhance the e-commerce customer journey by leveraging data-driven insights, personalized recommendations, and real-time support with some exciting AI-driven ecommerce tools . Explore the concept of the e-commerce customer journey to unlock greater success in the digital landscape.

Stages of the Customer Journey in E-commerce

Discovery: Overcoming the overwhelming choices

Whether it's an omnichannel or multichannel business, every customer journey map commences with the critical stage of discovery, where potential customers are exposed to an overwhelming array of products and brands. AI comes to the rescue by enabling businesses to offer personalized recommendations tailored to individual preferences, helping customers navigate through the sea of options with ease.

Research: Guiding customers in their decision-making process

During the research phase, customers seek information, compare products, and weigh their options. However, the abundance of data can often lead to confusion and decision paralysis. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants provide real-time support, addressing customer queries, offering product insights, and guiding customers in their journey through the decision-making process.

Consideration: Unraveling customer preferences & expectations

As customers evaluate their options during their purchase journey, businesses need to understand their preferences and expectations to stand out in a competitive landscape. AI-driven sentiment analysis and review mining help businesses extract valuable insights from customer feedback, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiments, identify pain points, and make informed improvements.

Conversion: Boosting conversion rates with personalization

The conversion stage is where customers make their purchasing decision. However, generic marketing strategies often fall short of capturing their attention. By leveraging AI, businesses can deliver personalized offers, dynamic pricing, and targeted promotions based on customer behavior and preferences. Machine learning algorithms analyze vast amounts of data, enabling businesses to predict purchasing patterns and tailor their offers for maximum impact on the customer journey.

Post-Purchase Engagement: Ensuring Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

The customer journey extends beyond the purchase, as businesses strive to foster long-term relationships. AI-powered customer service chatbot systems play a vital role in providing proactive and personalized assistance, ensuring customer satisfaction, and fostering loyalty. Through AI-driven chatbots, email marketing campaigns , and recommendation engines, businesses can continue to engage customers, address their concerns, and offer relevant post-purchase experiences.

How does a Marketing Funnel differ from a Customer Journey Map?

The marketing funnel:.

The marketing funnel, also known as the sales funnel, is a linear model that illustrates the customer's progression through specific stages of the buying process. It typically consists of three key stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. The funnel analogy represents how customers enter at the top, with a broader audience, and gradually move down, becoming more qualified leads and eventually making a purchase.

At the top of the funnel, the focus is on creating awareness and capturing the attention of a wide audience. Marketing efforts here aim to generate brand awareness, attract potential customers, and introduce them to the products or services offered. As customers move down the funnel, the focus shifts to nurturing leads, providing relevant information, addressing their concerns, and guiding them toward making a purchase decision.

The Customer Journey Map:

On the other hand, a customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience from the customer's perspective. It goes beyond the linear progression of the marketing funnel and takes into account all touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a brand across various channels and stages.

An e-commerce customer journey map captures the customer's emotions, motivations, and behaviors at each stage of their interaction with the brand. It helps businesses understand the customer's needs, pain points, and expectations, allowing them to tailor their marketing strategies and touchpoints to deliver a seamless and personalized experience.

Unlike the marketing funnel, which focuses primarily on the stages leading to a purchase, a customer journey map encompasses the entire customer lifecycle, including pre-purchase research, post-purchase support, and even advocacy or repeat purchases. It helps businesses identify opportunities for improvement, optimize customer touchpoints, and build long-lasting relationships.

Is the Ecommerce Journey Map for B2B & D2C Similar?

When it comes to the ecommerce journey map, there are differences between B2B (Business-to-Business) and D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) models. While there may be some similarities, it's important to understand the distinctions. Let's explore:

• Target Audience : B2B focuses on businesses as customers, whereas D2C targets individual consumers. The target audience's needs, behaviors, and purchasing processes differ significantly between these two models.
• Complexity of Sales Process : B2B transactions often involve complex sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and longer lead times. In contrast, D2C transactions tend to have simpler processes with shorter decision-making cycles.
• Relationship Building : B2B relies heavily on relationship building and nurturing long-term partnerships. D2C, on the other hand, focuses on building brand loyalty through direct customer interactions and experiences.
• Purchase Volume : B2B transactions typically involve larger purchase volumes and recurring orders, while D2C transactions tend to involve smaller individual purchases.
• Decision-Making Factors : B2B purchases are driven by factors such as cost-effectiveness, functionality, and integration with existing systems. D2C purchases are influenced by factors like brand reputation, product quality, and personalized experiences.Although there may be some overlapping stages in the ecommerce journey map for B2B and D2C, the nuances in the target audience, sales complexity, relationship building, purchase volume, and decision-making factors require tailored approaches.

How to Improve the Ecommerce Customer Journey using Manifest AI?

Personalize the shopping experience

AI shopping assistants like Manifest AI can gather and analyze customer data, enabling businesses to personalize the shopping experience. By understanding individual preferences, purchase history, and browsing behavior, AI can recommend relevant products, provide tailored recommendations, and offer personalized assistance throughout the e-commerce customer journey.

Streamline product search and discovery

The best way to significantly improve the efficiency of product search and discovery is by implementing AI-driven chatbots. These assistants can understand customer queries, refine search results, and provide accurate and relevant product recommendations by leveraging natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. This helps customers find the right products quickly, reducing frustration and enhancing the overall journey.

Enable real-time support and assistance

Manifest AI helps you provide instant, real-time support to customers at every stage of the e-commerce journey. Through a GPT-powered chatbot, customers can ask questions, seek guidance, and receive immediate assistance without the need for human intervention. This improves customer satisfaction, resolves queries promptly, and boosts confidence in the purchasing process.

Multilingual Support

Manifest AI can understand English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and many more languages. It can simplify the purchase journey by offering intelligent suggestions. It can provide you favorable shopping experience by answering your queries in your language.

Continuously learn and adapt

The best feature is it can learn and adapt based on customer interactions and feedback. By analyzing customer preferences, behavior patterns, and transaction history, Manifest AI can continuously refine its recommendations and personalized offerings. This adaptive learning ensures that the customer journey evolves and improves over time, resulting in a more tailored and satisfying experience.

The Final Thoughts

In conclusion, leveraging AI customer journey mapping unlocks immense potential for businesses. By personalizing the shopping experience, streamlining product search, offering real-time support, simplifying checkout, and continuously learning and adapting, businesses can create seamless and satisfying experiences. Embrace the power of Manifest AI to navigate the complexities of e-commerce and build lasting customer relationships. Get ready to embark on a transformative journey where technology and customer-centricity converge for success in the dynamic world of e-commerce.

How to Create an E-commerce Customer Journey Map

Creating an e-commerce customer journey map is an excellent way of putting yourself in your customer’s perspective to anticipate their needs and pain points.

These e-commerce customer journey maps help you better understand the customer experience and offer deep insight into the consumer’s mindset at every step of the purchase.

A customer’s buying behaviour is one of the essential parts of any business. Therefore, the process a customer goes through in purchasing a product from your store is vital to increasing conversion for your business.

An e-commerce customer journey map is a great way to analyze customer experience and identify any difficulties customers face that prevent them from purchasing.

Creating your e-commerce customer journey well can help your business improve its customer experience and reputation.

In this article, we will be sharing how to map out the e-commerce journey successfully.

Table of Content

What is the e-commerce Customer Journey?

Statistics to Prove the value of customer experience

Stages of the E-commerce Customer Journey

Why You Have To Build A Customer Journey Map?

How To Create Your E-commerce Customer Journey Map?

Visualizing Your E-commerce customer Journey Map

Tools for Creating an Effective E-commerce Customer Journey Map

How E-commerce Businesses Can Improve Their Customer Journey

What is the eCommerce customer journey?

The e-commerce journey refers to a customer’s entire experience purchasing a product from a business online. From when they know the product to when they complete the purchase and reach out to customer support.

The goal of a customer journey map is to allow brands to see their business from their customer’s perspectives. This makes it easier for you to identify the different actions a customer needs to take across each stage and how your business should respond to and facilitate them.

Additionally, a customer journey map can help your business to optimize the customer journey process by providing a highly personalized experience and gaining valuable insights into consumers’ pain points across all your marketing channels and touchpoints and the ways to improve them.

Customer journeys usually involve many channels and platforms. This includes when they see a social media or Google Ad, read your blog, or see testimonials or reviews.

Therefore, a comprehensive e-commerce journey map can help you target a prospect across multiple channels and also allow you to leverage data from your customer’s activity.

An e-commerce customer journey should help answer the following question :

• How do customers discover or find your business?
• What motivates a customer before making a purchase?
• What leads to sales or abandonment?
• At what stage in the customer journey are you losing customers?
• Do customers research or go for any of your competitors?
• Do customers have a smooth user experience on your website?
• How could you improve your customer user experience?
• Statistics show that 48% of shoppers abandon a brand’s website for their competitors due to poor customer experience (CX).
• Also, 89% of consumers quit shopping from e-commerce sites after experiencing poor CX.
• Another statistic says that 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences.
• Furthermore, companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries.
• While 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in revenue.
• About 70% of Americans have spent more money to do business with a company that offers excellent service.
• Also, 81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
• And 68% of customers say the service representative is key to a positive service experience.

Stages of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

To map out an eCommerce customer journey, we need to understand each stage of the trip.

1. Awareness

The first stage of the e-commerce customer journey is awareness. At this stage, a potential customer is experiencing a problem. So he researches to understand the situation better and see if it has solutions.

The goal of the awareness stage is to get the attention of your potential customers and direct them to your website. This stage involves how you monitor your customer’s interaction with your brand. A customer at this stage discovers who you are and what you have to offer. It can be through an advertisement, a social media or blog post, search engines, a website, word of mouth, or testimonies.

Therefore, you need to extend your website’s visibility to customers to raise enough awareness and interest, urging them to find out more. As an e-commerce business, you may use Google Analytics to learn how customers arrived on your site and their behaviours. Did they find you through searches, social media posts, or ads? Understanding this will give you a better idea of their interests.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, potential customers are now researching ways to solve their problems. For example, the customer may find something that interests them on your website. At this point, the buyer is considering purchasing a specific item on your website that can solve their problem but also weighing other options.

For example, a graphics designer is looking for a laptop that can successfully operate the latest Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator versions. The customer journey could begin with a problem; for example, his computer is outdated or malfunctioning, which has hindered him from performing his graphics design project. In contrast, it could start with an opportunity, like a tempting advert that sparks the customer’s interest in the new laptop, let’s say an ad showing a discount of 30% off a computer that can successfully operate Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator software. So the customer might consider going for it.

This stage aims to ensure your e-commerce website is leveraging all strategies by auditing the e-commerce customer experience to ensure that browsing customers are turned into paying customers.

3. Decision

At this stage, the customer starts to narrow down their options on what to purchase. Here a potential customer may be converted into an actual one as long as you can make them see that your product is what they need.

You can leverage other aspects of your business to help the customer make a purchase. For example, it can include 24/7 customer support, an optimized checkout process, a discount and a warranty on the product. You can also provide a sense of urgency if they have added the item to the cart but are yet to pay.

Apart from the above, this is where they learn what makes your product unique and different from the competitor’s and why it is the best for them. It is essential to have more different touchpoints to help you communicate effectively to your audience. It might be through your videos, images, infographics, testimonials, and reviews. Just what will resonate with the customer to help them make the purchase.

4. Retention

When a customer purchases at your store, you are happy and satisfied. But when they return to buy more is even more satisfying. This means they are happy with the customer experience and have an exciting customer journey. This leads to brand loyalty because they will first look at your site before others. Unfortunately, it isn’t only cheaper to retain customers and brings more revenue in return. Research shows that the cost of acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times that of having an existing customer.

However, not every business can reach this stage because it takes hard work to keep up with that standard. For example, after a customer buys your product or uses your services, their experience and decision to use or buy your service or product respectively depends on the quality of your product and customer service.

If the customer does not have a great experience with your brand, they will not patronize you a second time. They may even go as far as leaving negative reviews on your site and telling their friends and families about their poor experience.

Furthermore, you can use the retargeting strategy so that your products show up for them online.

5. Advocacy

This stage involves customers who are already familiar with your brand and are loyal. They often interact with your business through social media, webinars, websites, or blog posts. They share your post on social media and tell their friends and families about your business.

These customers can also become potential buyers through their testimonials and reviews. And research shows that 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. And 94% of consumers believe that positive reviews make them more likely to buy from a business. Therefore, positive reviews from loyal customers can increase your engagement and ultimately generate sales.

Every day customers are searching for something new online. They want a unique, memorable experience. The best way to ensure that you give your customers a fantastic experience is to create an e-commerce customer journey map to understand the entire process each customer goes through when buying a product.

Essentially a customer journey map should do the following;

1. Help show how customers view your business

A customer journey map can help your e-commerce business by allowing you to step into your customers’ shoes and see how they interact. This can help you make adjustments that will help you create better service for them.

2. Helps understand customer needs and pain points

When you build a customer journey map, you create a well-detailed one that will uncover a range of conditions and pain points throughout the whole customer journey. Therefore as you update your map regularly, you begin to discover new pain points.

3. Help set more realistic goals

A good customer journey map can help your business set more actionable and realistic goals through the data you might have collected. The information you collected through data and other empirical methods gives you an idea of what makes your business grow and develop. This can give you an insight into what type of goal you should set for your business.

4. Helps Understand your customer’s needs

Knowing and understanding your customer’s needs is another important reason for building a customer journey map. Knowing what your customers need, how they think, and what they like and don’t like can help you create the best customer journey.

This enables you to create content and touchpoints currently missing at certain stages of your buyer lifecycle. 

5. Helps create a smooth experience

A customer journey map will create a smooth experience for your c customers throughout their purchasing journey and remove any obstacles in the buying process Remove friction and barriers in the buying process.

How To Create Your Ecommerce Customer Journey Map?

There is no official template to build your e-commerce customer journey map. It depends on your business, product, or services. Therefore you can explore and be creative when creating your e-commerce customer journey map.

However, there are some basic things you need to do before starting.

1. Set your goals

Before you build your customer journey map, you must first identify what you want to achieve from the process. Placing them would make it easier to choose the most effective ways to target your audience.

You need to ask yourself if your business wants to:

• increase conversion and overall sales of the online store;
• discover customers’ pain points and problems in a given scope of the journey;
• brainstorm the solutions for discovered problems
• reduce the number of refunds
• increase the number of reviews

The goal is to track your progress and define the scope of the area you want to map.

2. Define customer personas

To better understand your customer, you need to develop a customer persona to get into your customers’ shoes so you know how they behave. According to Oberlo, a buyer persona is a fact-based representation of the person who will spend money with you. This profile is created through market research and collecting online data about your existing buyers. A customer persona helps you visualize what your ideal online customer will likely experience while shopping on your website. 

Characteristics to be considered when creating a customer personae include demographics, lifestyle, behaviour patterns, motivations, information sources, and shopping preferences.

You can use tools like Google Analytics to collect feedback from buyers with surveys and questionnaires. Note that personas have to be based on accurate data.

Then it would be best if you combined their traits into numerous specific personas with unique characteristics, even a name. The closer the personas are to the customer segment they represent, the higher the chance you can improve their shopping experience in real life.

3. Identify Touchpoints for Each Stage

It is essential to highlight every possible way a customer might interact with your business at every stage of the customer journey.

A touchpoint to anytime a customer comes into contact with your brand before, during, or after they purchase from your store

Various touchpoints can include:

Before purchase

• Word-of-mouth and referrals.
• Social media channels
• testimonials and reviews
• Advertisement

During Purchase

• phone system

After Purchase

• Customer support
• Transactional email
• Marketing email
• Thank you cards

The goal here is to put yourself in the customer’s position and try asking yourself the following questions:

I have a problem (I want a new laptop to design graphics).

“Where do I go, and how do I get there to find a solution to this problem?

I find the right laptop that can operate Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

I’m making my purchase decision.

I reach out to the business for support after the purchase.

I make my next purchase of similar products.

You can also use Google Analytics to identify the most popular parts of your site. Use the Behaviour Flow and Goal Flow reports to see how prospective customers move between different touchpoints and which flows are the most common.

4. Identify the pain points

You have created your customer avatar and identified your touchpoints. It’s time to identify various pain points.

To do this, you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to be empathetic to your customer’s emotions while going through their journey.

You need to ask yourself the following:

• What is my customer thinking and feeling at each stage
• What questions do they have about your products?
• What is stopping them from buying your product?
• What is the motivation behind them checking out your website?
• How is my business fulfilling the customer’s goals? 
• What are their needs, expectations, and concerns for each of those points

When you get into a customer’s mind, you will be able to develop strategies to improve your customer service processes from the beginning to the end.

5. Analyze and Improve your customer experience

After you have identified your touchpoints and pain points, you can now use that to improve your customer experience. To do this, you must put yourself in your customer’s shoes while going through their journey. For example, What is the motivation behind them checking out your website? What questions do they have about your products? What is stopping them from buying your product?

To ensure a compelling user experience, you must address each pain point like website speed, payment options, difficulty contacting customer support, etc. Optimizing your website for mobile devices can also guarantee an excellent user experience. Considering all these, you can create an e-commerce journey map to improve the customer experience.

Visualizing Your Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

After you have defined your goals and customers and identified various touchpoints and pain points, you can start visualizing your customer journey. To do this, you must rely on the data you have collated, like identifying the stages your customers go through when interacting with your business, their goals, pain points etc.

Here is an example of an e-commerce customer journey Map

An e-commerce customer journey map of a graphics designer

Building an e-commerce customer journey map is essential to cater to the unique touchpoint and goals of your business.

Below are some of the tools that can help you develop an e-commerce customer journey map of tools that can help you create a practical e-commerce customer journey map

Nielsen Group

Clarabridge

How Ecommerce Businesses Can Improve Their Customer Journey

Successfully mapping out the e-customer journey is one thing, but knowing how to improve them to deliver an extraordinary customer experience is another.

Note that the e-commerce journey does not end with your map. It has to be constantly updated because new pain points and touchpoints are being discovered as you advance in your business. Knowing how to improve your customer journey is very important for your customers to return.

1. Create touchpoints at every stage of the journey.

Touchpoints are anywhere your customers are interacting with your business. which can include reviews, testimonials, Ads, blog posts, etc.

Each touchpoint you create serves a specific purpose at each stage and its process in ensuring a smooth customer journey throughout the journey. Each touchpoint serves a purpose and plays its part in optimizing the overall customer journey. Therefore, having multiple touchpoints that correspond with their respective stages is essential.

2. Ensure your Website is well Optimized

One of the most critical factors you must consider as an e-commerce business. A well-optimized website for every device( mobile, desktop, tablets ) is essential to ensure a smooth customer experience.

You can use Google’s free testing tool to check if your website is well-optimized or you can do it manually by accessing your website via different devices.

An app also can be created to complement your website. Make sure the app is unique and offers what the website does not.

3. Initiate responsive and 24/7 customer support.

In this situation, you don’t wait for problems or for your customers to call you. You must think forward and anticipate the problem they might encounter at that particular stage of the journey and provide answers and solutions that will keep your customers satisfied.

You can do a video of some FAQ about your business and put it on your social media and youtube channels. You can ask customers to give feedback or conduct a survey to get this FAQ.

4. Frequently Collect And Analyze Data

Data can give you insight into the behaviour of your customers. Collecting data on customer behaviour via surveys, polls, social media platforms, and emails can help your e-commerce business create a better customer experience and generate more sales.

Managing customer relationships is one of the most essential elements an e-commerce business has to take seriously. Understanding the customer journey is one thing, but managing and updating your map regularly is another task.

Therefore, you must consistently provide a practical and uniform positive customer experience throughout every journey.

Make sure your e-commerce store is accessible and helpful across various channels, platforms, and touchpoints where your customers interact with you. 

About The Author

Opeyemi Olagoke

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Customer Journey Map For eCommerce Website

Nowadays, attracting a target audience to your business is quite a challenge. It’s a long way before your potential client becomes your customer. In times of high competitiveness, you should prepare a well-planned customer journey map to get those clicks and upscale your sales. 

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

What is a customer journey.

First of all, let’s examine the concept of the customer journey. It is the steps the buyer takes to interact with your business from the first click to the completed checkout. By mapping out these steps, you will understand your potential clients better.

For example, a person may find out about your brand from an influencer on social media . They will look at your business page but may close it due to some distracting factors. Then they might see you in the targeted ad. If they decide to follow it, they will recognize your brand and may choose a product they want to buy and add it to their shopping list. However, it doesn’t mean that they will buy it at once. They may come back to it in a week but also add something else to the shopping cart. This whole process from discovering your business to making a purchase is an example of a customer journey.

What Is A JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) Approach?

A Jobs-to-be-done approach relies on the presumption that the more ways the product can be used, the more valuable and popular it becomes. For example, a smartphone has thousands of uses, from news reading to conference meetings. Therefore, it is one the most popular products as almost every person owns it.

This approach is relevant for customer journey mapping as it provides the purchaser’s perspective to engagement with your brand. This way allows building a stronger connection and better engagement with the client, as opposed to creating CJM from the company’s point of view. It will help understand what and how the customer will most likely purchase from you. It is implemented with in-depth one-on-one interviews involving 10-15% of your brand’s customers. An interviewer needs to find out what caused your buyer to choose your brand and find out their specific purchaser journey. Here are the questions that can be used: How did you look for a solution to your pain point? What led you to purchase? How and when did you make the decision to purchase from our brand?

JTBD sets your mind on the client’s logic and will allow you to see what they really need. As Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt said: “People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes” . Thus, a JTBD approach provides actionable insights in creating a customer journey map, rather than simply improvements to the already existing ones. The company’s job is not to block the buyer’s move through the journey map but to provide any option the customer wants to choose.

Some Examples Of Touchpoints In A Customer Journey

As we’ve already mentioned, from the time the customer finds out about your brand to their purchase, they do many different actions. They are called digital touchpoints. These are the moments of buyers’ interaction with your brand during their eCommerce customer journey.

Touchpoints can be ads, social media posts, website visits , and product or store reviews. They attract the client’s attention and compel them to engage with your business. The buyer gains experience with your brand by going through those various touchpoints.

Every customer journey is specific, however, it has been estimated that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before the purchase is made. Your shopper’s acquaintance with your brand may begin with a targeted ad on social media. Then they will visit your social media page and look through your posts. After that, they may visit your website and subscribe to your newsletters. Then they may find an interesting offer in your letter and finally make the purchase.

Stages Of A Customer Journey

Throughout their customer journey, the user goes through several stages. These stages include awareness, consideration, decision, buying experience, loyalty, and repeated purchase. Every stage includes different touchpoints for the buyer to engage with your business.

At this stage of the user journey, the buyer finds out about your business and starts engaging with it. The awareness stage can include the following touchpoints:

• Ads. Your potential client may find out about your platform by clicking on Google Ads or via other advertising services.
• Recommendations. Word-of-mouth recommendations are also an effective way of raising brand awareness.
• Social media. You can raise awareness of your brand by posting on social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
• Google. Google’s tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Ads, and Google Tag Manager, can help you appear high in search so that your potential regular notices your platform.

Consideration

After acquaintance with your platform, the shopper starts comparing your service with competitors. The potential client considers the option that provides the best solutions to their problems.

• Reviews. The buyer will study the reviews of your business created by other users on your website, social media, or on review platforms.
• Remarketing ads. You may remind your visitors about your brand by retargeting ads.
• Promo emails. Your clientele may be interested in your offers getting promo emails. Email marketing allows for the creation of targeted and personalized content that reaches the right people at the right time. Also, it will allow you to conduct surveys and collect feedback.
• Product pages. The potential client will look through your product pages to study your business. Therefore, it is crucial to have full and truthful information about your products and their description to create a smooth customer experience.

The next stage in the customer journey map comes when the purchaser chooses you. They will take some actions that will lead them to purchase.

• Adding a product to the cart. When the buyer decides to buy a product, they will first add it to the cart. However, it does not necessarily mean that the purchase will be complete in the next step. People may be distracted by other ads or various circumstances and may leave the cart abandoned .
• Applying for installment payments . The buyer may apply for dividing installments into several payments if they are not ready to pay the whole sum in one installment but still want to buy the solution you offer.

Owning & Creating Buying Experience

After making a purchase, the purchaser will move on to communication with the support service if they have any further questions or concerns about your platform.

• Customer support. You need a good team that can provide high-quality support to help your regulars in case they have any questions about your product. You can provide customer support with chats, chatbots, real-time calls, communication with operators etc.
• Customer service. If the buyers get any problems with your product, you should be able to provide proper service to avoid dissatisfaction. Your product will also be more buyer-oriented if you can provide a guarantee that is valid for some time.
• Refunds/returns flows. If you cannot fix the problem with your product, offer a refund or return option to prevent a bad shopping experience.

If your buyer trusts your brand and hasn’t found any better solutions on the market, next time they will visit your platform once they make up their mind to buy something.

Eliminating the awareness and consideration stages when buying next time means loyal clientele will immediately go to your platform once they think of what they need. You can achieve brand loyalty by constantly engaging with your clients via social media, newsletters, targeted ads, etc.

Repeat Purchase

If the buyer is completely satisfied with your brand, they will repeat the purchases in the future. You can set up a repeat purchase to make their user journey easier.

• Activation emails. You may send emails to remind your regular shoppers to renew your product version every once in a while.
• Communication with managers. Your client may want to repeat a purchase when they communicate with your managers.

How To Map A Customer Journey In eCommerce?

Apply the jtbd approach to your buyer personas.

A jobs-to-be-done approach provides opportunities to connect to your buyer persona by understanding their behavior better. Therefore, It is efficient in eCommerce customer journey mapping for enhancing shopper experience . If you know that your buyer persona prefers a certain type of cosmetics, you can offer them to add additional items of the same trademark within a minute of their purchase.

Choose A Customer Journey To Map

Every buyer persona is different and has different behavior in the website journey. Therefore, it is likely that your store will have a few user journeys at once. You need to test your website for problematic experiences to fix an issue journey. Your platform also needs to provide opportunities for other customer journey maps. Also, if the client added some items to the cart but didn’t complete the purchase, you can remind them to renew their buyer journey in a few days by email.

Map The Chosen User Journey

To map a user journey , you need to find answers to certain questions. These questions include: who takes part in the journey, what are their needs or pain points, what are the processes of the user journey, what is the behavior of your buyer persona etc.

Measure Results and Iterate

Mapping the customer journey in eCommerce resembles a design thinking methodology. This methodology is efficient not only in design but in managing other projects as well. Design thinking is a buyer persona-oriented approach to developing projects that connect the needs of people, tech capabilities, and business processes.

The goal of all these steps in mapping the eCommerce customer journey is to provide the necessary points to satisfy the customer and polish your platform’s buying experience.

eCommerce Customer Journey Map FAQ

Why map customer journeys.

Mapping the customer journey is very important for your platform. It will help you provide the best solutions to your shopper’s needs. The mapping process will also improve the customer experience by making it more personalized to your buyer persona. A well-developed buyer journey map will upscale your business.

What Is The Goal Of A Customer Journey Map?

The ultimate goal of mapping the customer’s journey is to understand your customers better and ensure the best quality of their shopping experience.

What Is The Difference Between A Customer Journey Map And An Experience Map?

Customer journey and experience maps are similar. However, while the first one is about the processes the purchaser goes through when completing the purchase, the shopper experience map is concerned with the emotional and psychological satisfaction of the services you provide.

Is Customer Journey Mapping Inevitable?

With the increase of competition in eCommerce platforms and improvement of customer experience, mapping a customer journey is becoming a must for brands, manufacturers, retailers, and other market players to stay on top of the competition. Buying experience becomes more and more crucial to keep sales on the top and satisfy customers.

Throughout their Journey future buyers constantly consume information. Therefore, top-quality product data is an essential part of buyer journey mapping. To develop a well-functioning customer journey, it should be enriched , verified , and standardized .

Gepard can help your eCommerce operations to manage product information efficiently. It is especially relevant for brands and manufacturers that sell many products and have to syndicate the product content to deliver it to different sales channels rapidly and taking into consideration all the buyer’s journey maps. Want to learn how a PIM solution can facilitate your customer journey? Book your free personalized demo now.

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Managing the E-Commerce Customer Journey in 2023

• by Nessa Garcia
• Jun 9, 2022

Poor understanding of the customer journey can lead to cart abandonment, low conversions, and lost revenue.

Managing the e-commerce customer journey provides insights into your customers’ decision-making process and reveals what influences their actions.

Brands can understand the customer experience by creating a journey map, using tools to generate heatmaps and collect customer analytics, and analyzing competitors.

After improving and optimizing a customer journey strategy, a headless e-commerce platform like fabric lets brands implement solutions that enable growth and support continued improvements to the customer experience.

The e-commerce customer journey defines the path a customer takes when making a purchase decision. Understanding the customer journey can give your brand valuable insight into what works — why a customer makes a purchase — and what doesn’t — why a customer clicked away and purchased a product from your competitor.

Though this seems a simple concept, it’s anything but. Brands struggle with optimizing the customer journey, with 29.6% citing an unclear customer journey strategy as the reason why.

For example, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.82%, according to the Baymard Institute. If that figure is close to the cart abandonment rate for your brand, can you explain why? And, if so, can you explain why with conviction ?

Managing the e-commerce customer journey helps you discover and deliver the information customers need at each stage of the buying journey. From there, you can optimize the journey to improve the customer experience, reducing cart abandonment and increasing conversions.

But to do so effectively, you need two key components: a customer journey map and technology that tracks customer behavior.

Step One: Create the Journey Map

Managing the e-commerce customer journey starts with understanding the customer experience. How do customers navigate your storefront ? How easily are they finding the products they’re looking for? Is the experience convenient, or are there hurdles getting in the way of your brand making a sale?

Identifying pain points can give you insight into some of your metrics — both those you are tracking and those you should be measuring. Where metrics give you results, creating an e-commerce customer experience map can give you the whys.

For example, a high bounce rate might be explained by a navigation menu that’s difficult to use.

A customer journey map is a visual story of each engagement customers have with your brand. It starts from the initial recognition of a need to retain and encourage repeat customers. Each stage pairs with the particular pain point the customer has at that moment.

By outlining the expected pathway, you can better understand your customers’ needs and how your content can guide them through your sales funnel. The more you understand your customers and their journey, the better experiences you can provide.

How to create a customer journey map

• Start on your brand’s home or landing page. List everything that happens, identifying elements that pop out, such as cookie notices, promo banners, or email signup requests.

The landing page of Anthropologie. Upon loading, visitors are greeted with a popup notifying them of the brand’s cookie usage.

• Navigate to a product detail page (PDP) . Mimic the actions of a customer. How many clicks does it take to navigate to a relevant PDP? Is it difficult to find the product you’re looking for?

An Anthropologie PDP. It took two clicks to reach this page from the initial landing page, with an email signup request box popping up on the preceding “Dresses” page.

• Take notes and generate feedback. Like the caption above, annotate the step-by-step experience. How many clicks did it take to reach each PDP? Were popups and other promotions distracting or helpful? How easily could you find relevant product information? Include screenshots and other visuals that support your experience.
• Repeat the process with different site functions. Adopt the mindset of a customer and go through the entire shopping experience, from the initial visit to your brand’s website up to and including an attempted purchase. Is the shopping cart easy to manage? Are prices clear and upfront? How many steps does it take to go from adding an item to the cart to completing the purchase?

The Anthropologie shopping cart. It took one click to add the product to the cart, which then generated a popup showing all of the items in the cart. Another click led to the shopping cart page, which provided clear information about the items in the cart and the total cost.

The Anthropologie checkout page. Navigating to the checkout page required one more click, presenting the option to either sign into an existing account or checkout as a guest (without requiring a lengthy registration process).

• Repeat the process to create a complete e-commerce customer journey map.
• Use the collected feedback and information to improve your brand’s customer experience. Let’s say your current cart doesn’t allow customers to checkout without creating an account. According to the Baymard Institute, 24% of customers abandon their cart when a retailer requires them to create an account. By implementing a better checkout experience based on your customer journey map, you can improve your conversion rate.

Step Two: Track Customer Behavior

Customer journey mapping is only as effective as your analytics. Thus, you must ensure you have accurate data about what customers are doing when they interact with your brand.

Brands don’t always use data analytics well. A Gartner study reveals that nearly one-third of companies with an established customer journey map struggle to use it effectively.

The problem lies in the ability to gather and analyze the clickstream data needed to track customer behavior. This clickstream data, which is a detailed log of a user’s online behavior, is needed to understand where customers go and what they do with your content.

With it, you can see how people clicked on your site, what pages they visited, and how long they spent on each page. Without sufficient data, there’s no way to know your customers’ pain points and where to make improvements.

However, though clickstream data provides an overview of the customer’s actions, it does not explain the whole story. For that, you need a visualization tool, such as a:

• Heatmap , which highlights where you get the most engagement
• Session recording , which provides a video playback of the user’s time on your site
• Digital experience intelligence platforms like FullStory , which provides complete real-time data of every user interaction

These tools can help you find where there is friction on the buying journey. For instance, you may notice many users clicking on your product images to view more details. Or you may notice rapid and repeated clicking or scrolling, emphasizing issues with broken site elements (such as a broken link or malfunctioning script).

With these insights, you can articulate where your brand interactions are suffering. Then, you can build intuitive shopping flows, creating a seamless customer experience.

A heatmap visualizing customer activity on a given page. ( Source )

Step Three: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

81% of companies believe customer experience is a competitive differentiator. In other words, you’re likely to lose out on a sale if your customer journey pales in comparison to that of a competitor.

So what can you do to ensure your brand’s customer experience blows the competition out of the water?

Conduct a competitive analysis to identify differences between your brand and its competitors. Create a customer journey map for their website as you did your own, then compare:

• How fast did the website load?
• How were promos and offers presented? Were they visually appealing or did they negatively impact the customer experience?
• Was it easy to navigate and get from the landing page to relevant PDPs?
• How were product details presented? Was product information clear? Were product descriptions accurate?
• Was the checkout process convenient? Were you required to register an account?

From there, identify solutions that can give your brand the edge it needs and incorporate them into your strategy.

Step Four: Create and Optimize Your Strategy

The insights gained through creating an e-commerce customer journey map must be leveraged to influence your overall strategy. In some cases, this will require simplifying the customer journey , though the extent — and how you do so — is dependent on your target market.

To that end, create customer personas. Doing so helps you capture the customer’s needs , especially when you approach your customer journey mapping under the guise of a persona.

For optimal control over the customer journey, place greater emphasis on your D2C sales channels . Many brands, for example, begin by selling on Amazon and building their social presence. Doing so can be an effective way to extend your reach and generate early sales.

However, marketplaces limit your control over the customer experience because they don’t provide the data to know what your customers are doing.

By focusing on your D2C site, you can grow and optimize the buying journey to solve your customers’ pain points. This can often be accomplished by using a powerful and flexible headless e-commerce platform like fabric , which helps you add functionality and scale as your business grows and the needs of your customers change and evolve.

Customer marketing @ fabric. Previously @ Staples, BORDERLINX, and Groupon.

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping serves as a critical exercise for teams dedicated to improving how customers discover, interact with, and grow loyal to their products, services, and brand. This article sets out to demystify the concept of journey mapping by providing a detailed exploration of its process, significance, and impact. Through journey mapping, businesses can identify and dismantle the barriers hindering customer engagement and satisfaction, thereby enhancing their path to conversion and loyalty. In this article, we'll delve into the specifics of what makes an effective customer journey map, the stages involved in creating one, and how it can serve as a cornerstone for decision-making aimed at fostering a customer-centric culture. By the end of this piece, readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of customer journey mapping as not just a tool for visualization, but as a strategic asset for aligning business operations with the needs and expectations of their customers.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. It’s a holistic view that captures every experience and emotion your customers encounter, highlighting both the high points and the pain points of their journey. By plotting out these interactions step by step, from initial discovery through various stages of engagement to long-term loyalty, organizations gain invaluable insights into where they excel and where obstacles exist that may deter customers.

Because there’s a gray area in the differences between a “customer” and a “user,” product designers and marketers tend to use the terms “customer journey map,” “user journey map,” “buyer journey map,” and sometimes “ empathy map ” interchangeably. 

Lots of teams map the customer journey to develop empathy for the customer . It helps them keep the customer’s needs and intentions at the center of their decisions. This is a must for companies that want to be customer-centric.

The important thing to understand is that these labels refer to the same exercise of visualizing a person’s journey of interactions with a product or experience. it’s an extremely valuable exercise that'll give you a clear picture of the interactions customers have with your brand—both positive and negative. And it’ll help you discover opportunities to increase conversions and provide a better customer experience. Ultimately, organizations create customer journey maps to have a single source of truth for understanding their customers and their experience. 

Today, organizations must do all they can to capture the attention and delight of customers. That’s why customer journey mapping is an essential framework organization use to get a bird’s eye view of the entire customer experience to optimize customer interactions before, during, and after the buying process.

Related reading: What’s the difference between CX and UX?

Using touchpoints in your customer journey map

A good customer journey map thoroughly explores each customer interaction with the brand. These interactions between customer and brand are called “touchpoints.” They come in both physical and digital forms. Examples of physical touchpoints include billboards, mail, in-store experiences, and interactions with salespeople. 

Digital touchpoints can happen via social media, email, search engines, film, video, podcasts, in-app experiences, and more. As technology becomes more integrated with the physical world, the lines between physical and digital touchpoints will continue to blur. Already, brands are using omnichannel testing to ensure a consistent experience that can start on one piece of tech and end on another. 

Related reading: What’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel?

The size and scope of customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps vary widely. For some organizations, their business revolves around one customer journey map. Larger organizations could have dozens of products with multiple maps associated with each. 

Generally speaking, marketing and sales teams create customer journeys focused on problem recognition, information search, solution comparison, and purchase evaluation. Product design and UX teams create customer journey maps for different product “flows” or key moments that occur while customers use the product. Of course, these two realms frequently overlap. The best organizations have thorough multichannel testing procedures to ensure the brand experience is consistent across devices and experiences.

How customer journey maps improve customer experiences

With technological advances, organizations have more potential touchpoints than ever. At the same time, customers’ attention spans and tolerance for subpar experiences are shrinking. 

Customer journey maps are like a map of the battlefield for organizations. They’re vital. Without a single source of truth to rally around, internal conversations tend to go nowhere. Stakeholder disagreements abound, and wheels spin as teams toss ideas around with little rationale to back them up. Real human needs tend to fall by the wayside as speculation and guesswork drive decision-making.

Organizations today must ensure that a person’s journey from customer to lifetime advocate is seamless. To retain customers, customers’ experience of the product must be delightful and consistent with the journey that first drew them in. Journey maps are useful tools that provide clarity and allow organizations to be more strategic as they refine their offerings. 

Understanding the customer and their challenge

Teams create a customer persona to fully understand the human experience behind the problem they’re trying to solve. Teams need to know details like age, role, preferences, feelings, and more before they think about brainstorming solutions. To fully understand the problem customers need to be solved, look at any methods customers currently employ to reach their goals. Create competitor audits and conduct qualitative or qualitative research to identify pain points and customer behavior. Note any moments of friction or opportunities for innovation in your findings.

4 stages of a customer journey map

The customer lifecycle has four general stages: 

At this initial stage, prospects become aware of a potential product or service as a solution to their problem. This awareness can stem from various sources: social media content, word-of-mouth recommendations, advertising, or even a search engine result. It's crucial for brands to identify the most effective channels for reaching their target audience during this phase. The goal is to make a strong first impression that not only informs the prospect about the product but also engages them on an emotional level, prompting them to learn more.

Consideration

Once prospects are aware of their options, they move into the consideration stage, where they gather more information and evaluate the different solutions available. This is where detailed product information, user reviews, and comparison content play a significant role. Brands should focus on providing comprehensive resources that help prospects understand how their offering solves the problem more effectively than competitors. Content formats such as webinars, case studies, and detailed guides are particularly effective in engaging customers at this stage.

The decision stage is a critical juncture where a prospect chooses whether or not to purchase a product or service. At this point, factors like price, customer service, warranty, and return policies can significantly influence the final decision. Brands need to ensure that all questions or concerns are addressed promptly, offering personalized communication through channels like live chat or direct emails. Demonstrating value through free trials or demonstrations can also tip the balance in favor of a brand.

After the purchase, the focus shifts to retaining the customer and nurturing their loyalty. This phase is about ensuring the product or service lives up to the promises made during earlier stages. Follow-up emails, customer support, loyalty programs, and requests for feedback are all part of maintaining a positive relationship with the customer. Additionally, providing ongoing value through educational content, updates, and exclusive offers can encourage repeat business and referrals.

Product teams track behavior across every phase of the customer lifecycle. Creating detailed customer journey maps for each phase allows teams to identify and optimize every touchpoint in the customer's interaction with the brand. Depending on the complexity of their offerings and the diversity of their customer base, organizations may develop a single comprehensive journey map or multiple maps focusing on different aspects of the customer experience. This flexibility makes journey mapping a valuable tool for understanding and enhancing the customer's path, whether viewed from a broad perspective or in specific, targeted scenarios.  

Things to remember about journey phases:

• Define the phases by the customer’s point-of-view, not your own. Making assumptions or guessing will not provide you with genuine, actionable insight.
• Remember to base each phase on actual observable customer behavior, not cold hard data.
• Create a model that can accommodate all scenarios.
• Provide clear definitions for each stage.
• Discuss it with others in the organization and get internal buy-in from executives.

How to map a customer journey

With the customer persona and challenge documented, the team then establishes a primary goal that the customer or user will accomplish by the end of the journey map.

Creating a customer journey map is a collaborative and strategic process that uncovers the path your customers take with your brand. This detailed mapping helps in visualizing the customer's experience from initial contact through various touchpoints and ultimately to long-term loyalty. Here’s how to approach it:

1. Define Customer Personas

Start by defining detailed customer personas. These personas represent your ideal customers based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Include demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better you can tailor the journey to fit their needs.

2. Identify Goals and Challenges

Understand the primary goal of your customer journey map. Are you focusing on a specific part of the journey or looking at the entire lifecycle? Identify the main challenges your customers face at each stage of their journey. This understanding will guide the creation of your map.

3. List Customer Touchpoints

Identify all possible customer touchpoints. These are all the places where customers come into contact with your brand, both online and offline. Don’t overlook indirect touchpoints like reviews and social media mentions. Mapping out these touchpoints will help you see the journey from the customer's perspective.

4. Document the Stages of the Journey

Break down the customer journey into detailed stages—Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention. For each stage, list out what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling. This step will require gathering data from various sources, including sales data, customer feedback, and web analytics.

5. Identify Customer Needs and Company Inputs

Determine what information the customer needs to move to the next stage in their journey and what actions you want them to take. Also, consider what information your company needs to gather from customers to better serve them at each touchpoint.

6. Highlight Choices and Feedback Opportunities

Outline what options customers have at each stage of the journey and how they can provide feedback. This might include product choices, service levels, or channels for communication. Make sure there are mechanisms in place for capturing this feedback.

7. Note Critical Moments and Touchpoints

Identify critical moments in the journey that are make-or-break points for customer satisfaction and conversion. Pay extra attention to these moments to ensure they are as positive and seamless as possible.

8. Estimate the Journey Duration

Provide an estimate of how long the entire journey will take from the customer's perspective. This helps in setting realistic expectations and identifying any stages that may take longer than they should.

9. Address Internal Bottlenecks

Identify any internal processes or policies that could be creating bottlenecks or roadblocks in the customer journey. These are areas where internal changes could significantly improve the customer experience.

10. Map Out Each Step Sequentially

With all the above information at hand, start laying out the journey map. Use a format that allows you to visually represent each stage, touchpoint, customer action, thought, and emotion, and align your internal actions accordingly.

11. Collaborate and Refine

Creating a customer journey map is not a one-time task but a continuous process of refinement. Share the map with different teams within your organization to get their insights and make necessary adjustments. The goal is to create a map that is as accurate and actionable as possible.

Finalizing Your Customer Journey Map

Once your journey map is laid out, use it to identify areas for improvement, innovate on customer touchpoints, and ultimately enhance the overall customer experience. Remember, the map should evolve as your customers and your business do, making regular updates and reviews a key part of your strategy.

Now that the data has been gathered, the team collaborates to map out every step of the customer journey. Stages of the customer journey map are laid out sequentially, and important data from the above list (touchpoints, customer feelings, needs, choices, etc.) are organized underneath each stage.

Take a look at these 4 steps for building the customer journey map:

To draw out your map, you can use a whiteboard, paper and sticky notes, or a spreadsheet. There are also several online tools that you can use to build your map, like UXPressia and Canvanizer .

1. Identify the stages of a customer's interaction with your brand

Whatever medium you choose, the first step is to identify the stages of a customer’s interaction with your brand, from when they first hear about your company through the point when they become a brand advocate and customer for life. It will probably be something like this: discovery, research, conversion, and post-sale engagement.

2. Break down stages into activities

Next, break those stages into common activities that customers will complete at that part of their journey. For example, the Discovery phase for an airline company might have activities like “Search for a flight for an upcoming trip” or “Learn about traveling internationally.” Plot the stages and their activities across the top of your map:

3. Fill out the different channels

Now we’re going to fill out the different channels. Think of the ways your customers interact with your brand. You’ll probably want to include channels like Website (Desktop), Website (Mobile), Mobile App, Social Media, Phone, In-Person, and Chat Support. Plot these out on the left side of your map, from top to bottom.

4. Fill out the customer journey map

For this step, you’ll need to think about your personas. Which activities do they complete along their customer journey? Which channels do they use for each activity?

Remember, the exact journey isn't the same for each customer. Some customers will make a quick decision and move from discovery to purchase right away on a single channel. Others will take more time to research, compare, and ask questions across several channels.

For each persona, plot a point for each activity on the map and then connect the dots.

How to improve your customer journey maps

Creating a customer journey map is a critical step in understanding and enhancing the customer experience. However, the work doesn't stop once the map is created. Continuous improvement is key. Here are steps to refine and enhance your customer journey maps:

1. Gather Comprehensive Data

Start with a broad collection of data from various sources to ensure a complete understanding of the customer experience. Utilize analytics tools to gather quantitative data about how customers interact with your website, social media channels, and other digital platforms. Combine this with qualitative feedback from customer interviews, surveys, and feedback forms to understand the why behind their actions.

2. Implement A/B Testing

Use A/B testing to experiment with changes in the customer journey and directly measure their impact on customer behavior and satisfaction. Test different aspects of your website, email campaigns, and other touchpoints to see what resonates best with your audience. This approach allows for data-driven decisions that can lead to more effective customer interactions.

3. Engage with Customer Feedback

Actively seek out and listen to customer feedback at all stages of the journey. This can include direct feedback from surveys and social media, as well as indirect feedback through behavior analysis and customer support interactions. Understanding customer feelings and experiences is crucial for identifying areas for improvement.

4. Map Emotional Journeys

Beyond the physical touchpoints and actions, map out the emotional journey of your customers. Identify the highs and lows in their experience and consider how you can enhance the positive emotions while addressing and mitigating the negative ones. Emotional mapping can reveal insights into customer loyalty and satisfaction that traditional touchpoint analysis might miss.

5. Utilize Cross-Functional Teams

Involve teams from across your organization in the journey mapping process. Sales, customer service, marketing, and product development teams can all provide unique insights into the customer experience. Collaboration ensures a more comprehensive understanding and identification of opportunities for improvement.

6. Regularly Update Your Maps

Customer behaviors and expectations evolve, and so should your customer journey maps. Make it a regular practice to review and update your maps based on the latest data and feedback. This ensures your strategies remain relevant and effective in meeting customer needs.

7. Prioritize Actionable Insights

As you identify areas for improvement, focus on actionable insights that can have a tangible impact on the customer experience. Prioritize changes that offer the most significant benefit to your customers and your business, and plan for implementation in stages if necessary.

8. Measure and Iterate

After implementing changes, closely monitor their impact. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to each stage of the customer journey to measure success. This could include conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores, or net promoter scores (NPS). Use these metrics to iterate and further refine your customer journey maps over time.

Leveraging Your Improved Customer Journey Maps

By following these steps, marketing and design teams can not only improve their customer journey maps but also ensure they are continually evolving to meet customer needs. Improved journey maps can lead to enhanced customer experiences, increased loyalty, and ultimately, greater business success.

How to use a customer journey map

Here’s where things get fun (and actionable)! You’ll use the map to find opportunities to increase conversions and improve the customer experience.

Plotting your known high points and low points

First, mark your known pain points on the customer journey map.

A great starting place is to check in with your support team and find out what problems they address daily. For example, they might tell you that site visitors often chat because they’re confused about the pricing on your website.

You can also use any survey results you already have to find any problem areas. You might have a customer satisfaction survey that shows that your customers think it takes too long to get through to anyone on the phone when they need help.

Now, you’ve already identified a couple of optimization opportunities! Go ahead and mark them on the map.

You can do the same thing for places where you’re currently doing great. Do you often hear positive feedback from customers about how smooth your signup process is or how helpful your content marketing is? Add that to the map!

Discovering new opportunities

What about the interactions that aren’t positive or negative? At this point, you’ll use your analytics data and qualitative feedback to fill in the gaps in your customer journey map.

Maybe there are places where you might suspect there’s room for improvement, but you’re not sure what’s going wrong or what needs to be fixed. For example, when you look at your analytics, where are visitors bouncing from your site, abandoning their orders, or unsubscribing from your emails? When do they stop replying to your sales team’s outreach efforts? These actions tell you that there’s room for improvement and optimization.

So how do you determine what’s going wrong at these points? The best bet is to ask your customers directly. Ask questions like:

On a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely), how likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend, and why?

What would you change about this product if you had a magic wand?

How did your experience today compare to your expectations? Why?

You can ask these questions via a survey, a user test, or even over the phone, depending on what stage you’re investigating.

By now, your map should be getting pretty full. Give yourself bonus points if you can add a few words describing the customer's mindset at each interaction.

Testing a customer journey map

To test a customer journey map, teams need a strong balance of qualitative and quantitative data to understand what it’s like to be their customer. 

Quantitative data for customer journey maps

Quantitative research gives teams a high-level view of customer behavior at each stage of the journey map. The data is focused on understanding behavior in numbers. The more customers who go through the journey map, the better teams will be able to identify trends. 

Suppose a team is gathering quantitative data on a journey map for their website, for instance. In that case, they’ll look at factors like traffic sources, conversion rates, drop-offs, heatmaps, treemaps, and more to understand the moves customers make at each touchpoint. Quantitative data can also include survey responses, ratings, A/B tests, or web analytics that might help the team benchmark performance. 

Qualitative data for customer journey maps

Often, quantitative data will illuminate problems that only qualitative data can solve. It’s valuable to know that customers are dropping off at a specific touchpoint, but understanding why they’re dropping off is the key to innovation. 

Qualitative testing allows teams to drill deeper into human behavior's reasons. This type of research is focused on subjective emotional components and non-numerical data. Teams seek to understand customers’ values, opinions, and choices based on observation and interviews.

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• E-commerce analytics: What role do analytics play in B2B e-commerce?

For B2B organizations looking to grow, data-driven decisions are crucial for success.

Enter e-commerce analytics.

Whether you want to assess how your web store is performing currently, predict how it might perform in the next two quarters, or test revenue-boosting strategies, a thorough understanding of analytics is essential.

Table of contents

What is e-commerce analytics.

The term e-commerce analytics has become a catch-all for many things: is it a methodology, tool, or dataset? The answer is a little bit of everything.

E-commerce analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data generated by your online store in order to gain valuable insights into customer behavior, website performance, and marketing effectiveness. The ultimate goal being to boost the effectiveness of your web store, and therefore positively impact sales.

Types of e-commerce analytics

Purely because of how broad the term can be, it is helpful to map out the various ‘types’ of e-commerce analytics you might come across as a web store manager. Here’s an overview:

Audience analytics — who are your website champions?

Establishing who’s visiting your web store is the foundation of e-commerce analytics.

This can range from demographics to location, and include devices being used.

Benefit : Familiarity with your audience will enable you to tailor marketing messages and build a web store that resonates with your customer.

Acquisition analytics — how are they finding you?

If audience analytics answers the ‘who’ of your web store traffic, acquisition analytics answers the ‘where’.

Are they coming from organic search, social media campaigns, or maybe even good old-fashioned email marketing?

Benefit : This intel helps you identify the most effective ways to reach new customers.

Behavior analytics — mapping out your customer journey

Behavior analytics answers the ‘what’ question, digging deeper into what visitors actually do once they land on your site.

What pages are they clicking on? Are they adding products to their carts and then abandoning them?

Benefit : Analyzing their behavior helps you identify areas for improvement, as well as potential obstacles preventing your customers from checking out.

Conversion analytics — tracking sales and performance

This is where the rubber meets the road. Conversion analytics track how much revenue your web store is generating.

Here, you can measure things like conversion rates, average order value, and customer lifetime value.

Benefit : It’s all about understanding what’s working (and what’s not) when it comes to turning website traffic into sales.

Paid marketing activities — securing ROI on your marketing spend

If you’re running any pay-per-click (PPC) ads or social media campaigns, you’ll want to track their performance closely.

This type of analytics helps you see how much you’re spending on advertising, how many clicks you’re getting, and ultimately, how much revenue those clicks are generating.

Remember, you don’t have to be a data whiz to benefit from e-commerce analytics.

Benefit : By focusing on these key areas, you can gain valuable insights that will help you optimize your website, improve your marketing efforts, and ultimately grow your business.

We’re here to help.

If you’re feeling swamped by data or need a hand deciphering what it all means, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Why do analytics matter for your e-commerce store?

Imagine running your store blindfolded. You wouldn’t know what products are popular, how customers find you, or even if your website is easy to navigate. That’s the danger of operating an online store without analytics.

E-commerce analytics provide the crucial data you need to make informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes.

5 benefits of analytics for e-commerce

Sure, you know your store inside and out, but what about your customers? E-commerce analytics are like having a direct line to your customer’s thoughts and actions, revealing a wealth of information you can use to make smarter business decisions. Here’s a deeper dive into the key benefits of recording and tracking your e-commerce analytics:

1. Data-driven decision making: from hunches to hard facts

Analytics give you the cold, hard facts about what’s working (and what’s not) on your website. This allows you to:

• Optimize product pages : Identify which products are generating the most interest and see where visitors are dropping off. Use this data to refine product descriptions, improve visuals, and address any pain points that might be preventing purchases.
• Craft targeted marketing campaigns : Analytics reveal your ideal customer demographics, interests, and browsing behavior. Use this knowledge to tailor your marketing messages for maximum impact and avoid wasting resources on irrelevant audiences.
• Experiment with confidence : Want to test a new website layout or marketing strategy? Use analytics to track the results and see if it’s actually moving the needle.

2. Craft a customer experience that converts

Imagine walking into a store where you can’t find what you’re looking for, and the checkout line is a mile long. Wouldn’t you leave frustrated? Analytics help you avoid creating that same experience online.

By tracking user behavior, you can see:

• Navigation pain points : Are visitors struggling to find specific products or information? Analytics pinpoint areas of confusion so you can streamline your website structure and make it more user-friendly.
• Abandoned cart rates : Understanding why customers ditch their carts halfway through checkout allows you to identify and eliminate any roadblocks in the purchase process. This could be anything from a complex checkout flow to unexpected shipping costs.
• Product page engagement : See which product pages keep visitors engaged and which ones have them bouncing like a superball. This helps you understand what information resonates with customers and optimize your product pages for better conversion rates.

By creating a smooth and intuitive customer journey, you’ll keep visitors happy and coming back for more.

3. Increase sales and conversions: Turn window shoppers into paying customers

At the end of the day, your goal is to turn website traffic into sales. E-commerce analytics are your secret weapon for boosting conversions:

• Identify high-performing marketing channels : Analytics reveal which marketing efforts are driving the most traffic and sales. Invest more resources in these channels to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
• Personalize product recommendations : Use visitor data to suggest complementary products or highlight items based on past purchases. This creates a more relevant shopping experience and increases the chance of additional sales.
• A/B test different calls to action (CTAs) : Analytics help you determine which CTAs are most effective at converting visitors into leads or customers. Test different wording, placement, and design to see what resonates best with your audience.

By understanding your customers’ buying journey and optimizing your website for conversions, you’ll see a significant increase in sales and revenue.

4. Reduce costs: Stop wasting money on what doesn’t work

Running a successful online store is all about efficiency. Analytics help you identify areas where you might be wasting precious resources:

• Ineffective marketing campaigns : Track the performance of your marketing efforts and see which ones are generating the most sales and leads. Cut bait on campaigns that aren’t delivering and reinvest your budget in more effective channels. • Unnecessary website features : Are you paying for fancy features that nobody uses? Analytics reveal which website functionalities are most popular with visitors. This allows you to prioritize resources and focus on features that drive results. • Hidden website issues : Analytics can highlight technical problems on your website, such as slow loading times or broken links. Fixing these issues creates a smoother user experience and can lead to higher conversion rates.

By identifying areas for improvement and eliminating wasteful spending, you can optimize your budget and maximize your bottom line.

Metrics vs KPIs: Understanding the difference

Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data your e-commerce store generates? Don’t worry, you’re not alone! But here’s the good news: that data is a goldmine of insights waiting to be unlocked. The key lies in understanding the difference between metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Metrics are essentially the raw data points you track about your online store. Think of them as ingredients in a recipe – website traffic, conversion rates, average order value – they all provide valuable information.

KPIs, on the other hand, are a select group of metrics that are most important for your specific business goals. They’re like the key spices that make your dish unique. For instance, a KPI could be “increase mobile traffic by 20% in Q3” to drive more sales through your mobile store.

By tracking the right KPIs and using the insights from your analytics reports, you can take action to improve your website and achieve your business goals.

So, how do you choose the right KPIs to track?

The best KPIs are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). They should be directly tied to your overall business objectives, such as increasing sales, improving customer acquisition, or boosting brand awareness.

We’ll delve deeper into specific B2B e-commerce KPIs and how to track them in future posts . In the meantime, remember: data is powerful, but it’s the insights you glean from it that truly make a difference.

Analytics vs. reporting: What does your business need?

Data is the lifeblood of any successful business, but simply having data isn’t enough. You need to be able to extract meaning from it and turn it into actionable insights. That’s where analytics and reporting come in. But what’s the difference, and which one does your business need most?

Understanding the why vs. understanding the what

Think of analytics and reporting as two sides of the same coin:

Analytics is all about unveiling the why. It delves deep into your data to uncover hidden patterns, trends, and root causes. This might involve complex techniques like statistical modeling or data mining. The ultimate goal of analytics is to provide actionable insights that can help you optimize processes, improve decision-making, and even predict future trends.

Reporting, on the other hand, focuses on understanding the what. It takes your raw data and summarizes it in a clear, concise format, often using charts, graphs, and tables. This makes it easy for you to see key metrics at a glance and track your performance over time. Reporting helps you identify areas for potential improvement and ensures everyone in your organization is on the same page.

Choosing the right tool for the job

So, which one does your business need? The answer depends on your specific goals and stage of growth:

• For businesses seeking a deeper understanding of customer behavior, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and new growth opportunities, investing in analytics capabilities is crucial. Analytics empowers you to explore the “why” behind your data, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategies for long-term success.
• However, reporting is essential for every business, regardless of size or industry. It provides a quick and clear overview of your performance, helping you monitor progress towards goals, identify areas that need attention, and ensure everyone is working with the same set of information. Think of reporting as the foundation – you need a solid understanding of “what” is happening before you can delve into the “why.

Here are some additional tips for making the best choice:

• Start simple : Don’t get overwhelmed by the vast world of data analysis. Begin with basic reporting to establish a data-driven culture in your organization. As your comfort level grows, you can gradually incorporate more advanced analytics techniques.
• Think long-term : If you have a long-term vision of building a data-driven culture within your business, investing in robust analytics capabilities is a wise decision. However, reporting will always be a crucial tool for ongoing monitoring and communication.
• Align with goals : Ultimately, the best choice depends on your specific business goals. Ask yourself: what questions do you need answered? Are you trying to understand customer behavior (analytics) or simply track key performance indicators (reporting)?

By understanding the strengths of both analytics and reporting, you can choose the right tools to unlock the power of your data and propel your business forward.

From data to dollars: Master e-commerce analytics for growth

This comprehensive guide has equipped you with the knowledge to transform your data into a powerful weapon for growth.

Remember, data is king, but insights are the crown. By leveraging analytics and reporting effectively, you can:

• Uncover hidden customer behavior patterns.
• Optimize your website and marketing for peak performance.
• Make data-driven decisions that fuel sales.
• Craft a superior customer journey that keeps them coming back for more.

Turn data into strategy

Watch our 30-minute webinar on demand on harnessing the most out of your data.

More interesting resources

Guide: Is your commerce platform engineered for B2B?

Optimize your customer journey: A guide for B2B product sellers

A guide to e-commerce optimization for B2B businesses

• Sana Commerce

Idea2App Customer 17+

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