The customer journey in e‑commerce maps the entire experience a shopper has, from discovering a brand to making a purchase and beyond. Understanding each stage helps businesses tailor their marketing, optimize touchpoints, and provide a seamless experience. By analyzing the journey, companies can identify opportunities to increase engagement, build loyalty, and drive conversions.
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is a marketing term that describes the path of a potential customer from first contact to the purchase of a product. The target action along the customer journey isn’t always the purchase itself — it can also be signing up for a newsletter or following on social media. Often, the customer does not decide to buy immediately. Instead, they usually go through several different touchpoints before the desired action occurs. In the next section, we’ll show you how to map the ideal customer journey in your online shop. But first, you should understand why optimizing the customer journey makes sense.
Why is the customer journey important?
By optimizing the customer journey, you can guide your customers and make their shopping experience in your store as pleasant and easy as possible. Gain knowledge and insights into customers’ preferences and behavior, and apply this information strategically in marketing. By responding individually to your shoppers, you can optimize the customer journey in your online shop, simplify processes, and create an inspiring customer experience. Enough theory — now to practice.
What does the ideal customer journey look like?
With a practical example, we’ll show you what a personalized customer journey in e‑commerce looks like. We’ll focus exclusively on touchpoints within an online shop.
The center of our example is Marie, who is searching online for a new pair of jeans. After a short search on Google, she finds an attractive online fashion shop and clicks the suggested link.
Many paths lead to the goal: The homepage
Lands directly on the shop’s homepage.
She’s offered several options to find what she’s looking for quickly:
- Site search: Marie can use the search box (e.g., “jeans”) to quickly find suitable models. An intelligent search, for example, with autosuggest or tolerance for typos. With content commerce, not only products but also content can be found.
- Categories: Marie can navigate via the main menu to the “Jeans” category.
- Recommendations: If Marie has visited the shop before, the homepage can show her relevant products based on her previous behavior using a recommendation engine.
Since Marie hasn’t specified her requirements for the new jeans yet, and this is her first visit, she clicks the category.
The agony of choice: The faceted navigation
And on the category page, she finds the shop’s entire jeans assortment — nearly 1,000 items. She immediately notices the faceted navigation — a welcome feature that helps her narrow the selection to her personal taste.
By now, Marie knows what she wants: a blue, skinny-fitting pair of jeans in size 29, and the price should not exceed 60 dollars. Accordingly, she selects the “Skinny Jeans” subcategory in the facets, filters for women’s jeans and the color blue, marks size 29, sets the price maximum to 60 dollars, and reduces the results to five clear items. One pair especially appeals to Marie, so she clicks on the product. With faceted navigation, the product selection can be personalized in just a few clicks.
Everything at a glance: The product detail page
To view it on the product detail page. In addition to familiar aspects like price, color, and appearance, Marie finds further important product information such as material, cut, and features. Information on delivery time is also important to most online shoppers.
On the product detail page, she also receives relevant recommendations for the selected jeans in the form of similar items from the “Skinny Jeans” category or matching pieces from other categories like “Cardigan.”
If Marie is convinced by the jeans, the call-to-action (CTA) buttons at the bottom of the product detail page give her the option to either add the item directly to the cart or add it to her wish list. Because she really likes the skinny jeans, she adds them to her cart and opens it…
The product detail page provides online shoppers with more information about the selected product.
Last but not least: The checkout
Starts the checkout process without much hesitation. During checkout, she’s asked to provide her contact details, billing and delivery address, and payment information or to choose a payment method. For verification, Marie is shown an overview of the entire order, including the most important information such as price, size, and delivery date. If everything is correct, she can place the order by clicking the CTA button and will soon be happy to have a new pair of jeans in her wardrobe!
Our conclusion: Personalization and the customer journey simply belong together
No question — the customer journey is just as important in online shops as it is in brick-and-mortar retail. Operators of online shops must ensure that visitors can find their way around the store everywhere — from the homepage to the checkout. Longer dwell times, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates speak for themselves!