The rapid acceleration of ecommerce means the traditional customer journey is no longer linear. Customers face several microdecisions between interacting with your brand for the first time and becoming loyal customers. It’s your responsibility to cater to them with personalized marketing messages and product recommendations.
Success lies in using first-party data to understand the customer journey. One misaligned touchpoint can cause a potential customer to jump ship before ever reaching your store, or abandon a stocked cart, while the right personalized experience throughout the shopping journey, from acquisition to checkout, can turn a casual browser into a lifetime buyer.
These moments have become the foundation of customer intelligence. Brands that take advantage of them can lower customer acquisition costs and improve retention rates.
What is the ecommerce customer journey?
The ecommerce customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience of a customer, from when they first become aware of the brand via marketing and advertising, to the final purchase. This includes browsing, product selection, checkout, and post-purchase support. Understanding and optimizing the ecommerce customer journey helps businesses enhance engagement and increase conversions, as evidenced by the 59% increase in return shoppers over the past two years.
Building a clear picture of your customer journey starts with strong first-party data and a unified customer model that creates a single view of your customer across their entire journey, no matter where it starts and ends.
When your customer data lives in separate databases, marketing tools, analytics platforms, and CRM systems, you only see fragments of the journey. A unified data model combines browsing, purchasing, and order information across every sales channel.
![Chart showing the components of Shopify, including ecommerce platform, POS, supply chain, and inventory management.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/unifiedcommerce.png?v=1739139851)
This gives you a complete view of how customers discover your products, what convinces them to buy, and what brings them back for more. Instead of piecing together different versions of your customer from various tools, you work with one source of truth.
The customer journey stages
Awareness
Awareness is the first stage in any ecommerce customer journey. It starts when a customer’s interest is piqued, or they’re already looking for a product or service to solve a problem they’re currently experiencing. Common customer touchpoints at this stage include social media advertising or word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers.
Lead capture turns this initial interest into a direct connection with customers. Retailers pair awareness campaigns with strategic offers like discounts, cash rewards, or loyalty points. You can use the data you collect to power personalized marketing campaigns.
Consideration
A person’s commitment to finding a solution increases as they progress through to the consideration stage of the customer journey. Here, they weigh their options and visit your online store—as well any competing brands that might serve their needs.
Automation helps in the consideration phase. Depending on your commerce platform, you can automate touchpoints like:
- Dynamic product recommendations based on browsing history
- Automated email sequences triggered by specific page visits
- Personalized retargeting ads showing recently viewed items
- Smart popups offering assistance based on scroll depth and time on page
Automation also helps throughout the lead-nurturing process. For example, you can send behavior-triggered email campaigns, employ AI chatbots on your website, and send price-drop notifications for items in wishlists.
Acquisition
Acquisition is when a potential customer becomes an actual one through conversion, whether that’s through a purchase on your site or signing up for subscription or service on your ecommerce store, in a marketplace, at a retail location, or through a social media storefront.
Checkout is where the customer is made. A seamless and personalized checkout experience can make conversion faster and easier, while building long-term relationships.
During this stage, offering trusted payment methods like Shop Pay can significantly influence outcomes. Shop Pay users are 77% more likely to make additional purchases, which supports your acquisition goals.
Customer service
The ecommerce customer journey doesn’t end once a customer has made their first purchase. Inevitably, a segment of customers will need help with their order.
Whether they want to initiate a return, understand how the product works, or inquire about discounts on future purchases, customers expect responsive and helpful assistance through their preferred communication channels.
Retail brands can offer customer service through multiple touchpoints. Traditional channels like email and phone support are important, while live chat has become increasingly popular for its convenience.
AI-powered chatbots have become a first line of support, handling common queries 24/7 and directing more complex issues to human agents. These automated solutions can quickly address questions about order status, return policies, and product information.
Loyalty
Loyalty happens when existing customers continue purchasing from your brand. It’s the final stage of the journey, but not the least important. A study from Gorgias shows that despite only accounting for 21% of a brand’s audience, loyal customers contribute 44% of a merchant’s total revenue. Additionally, 59% of orders on the Shop app come from repeat buyers.
Aside from initiating another purchase and springing back to an earlier stage in the journey, customer touchpoints that frequently happen at the loyalty stage include leaving a review or recommending the product to a friend.
What is a customer journey map?
An ecommerce customer journey map is a diagram that details how customers engage with your company across various interfaces including online, retail, and contact with your customer support team. It tells you where users are coming from, how many days or visits it takes them to move from one stage to another, what the goal of the user is in each stage, and how each segment behaves.
![Example customer journey map showing the buyer’s time frame, brand’s goal, channels, and pages visited at each stage.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/customerjourneymap_49d8c01b-6e26-467c-b8a3-157c70ecaa41.png?v=1739139850)
Three steps to map customer journeys with data
While customer experience management is on the top of every C-suite executive’s list, the reality is that designing a robust omnichannel retailing strategy and managing the customer’s experience within the entire customer lifecycle is challenging.
Instead, a far better approach is to identify your most valuable customers (i.e., personas) and map their journeys one stage at a time.
Create customer personas to envision what your ideal customer might be going through when seeking your product. For a head start, identify recent customers or brand loyalty program members who made a purchase on your website. Interview them to answer the following questions:
- Why were they looking for the product that they bought on your website?
- How did they research the product?
- What criteria helped them make their purchase decision?
- Which of your competitors’ sites did they visit while evaluating products?
- Why did they choose your website?
- What was their experience like on your website when buying the product?
- What can be improved?
Start small and prioritize the most critical customer personas for your business. The real key is using your existing data to map the ecommerce customer journey based on psychological principles to drive more sales.
1. Monitor how customers interact with your ecommerce business
Understanding how users move through your store is critical to producing sales that follow a psychologically informed model. For example, why would sales be low if you’re offering a discount code to all first-time visitors? The offer (or, ability) might be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to buy. In this case, it doesn’t matter how much products are discounted.
This common scenario can be uncovered via the Google Analytics funnel exploration report, which will allow you to select a path you’d like to look into—or the path exploration report, which gives you a look into your user’s journey.
Make sure to examine different segments of users, whether it’s first-time visitors, returning visitors, or purchasers, or create a custom segment for visitors with long session durations but no purchases.
Segments can be based on demographic or order data, but first-party data can be used to create even more targeted segments like primary shopping channel, loyalty program engagement, and purchase history patterns.
![Graph of the touchpoints a customer has with a brand.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/touchpoints_7784b7ad-472b-497b-a7e1-f4a79afb1ab7.png?v=1739139850)
Look for trends that indicate places to improve, like specific drop-off points where hoards of users left your site without converting. Find out what page most first-time visitors view after landing on your homepage. In the first stage of an ecommerce customer journey map, you will start to notice that most of these first-touch pages revolve around building awareness before driving conversions.
You can also install Session Recording & Replays on your Shopify store to record visitor sessions. You’ll get heat maps and also be able to see user behavior as they move from page to page.
Detailed session histories can generate ideas of which pages correspond to each stage of the journey. For instance, your blog or story pages are often perfect jumping-off points to educate users. Hiya Health uses its “Our Story” page to build awareness, leveraging it to push consumers from one stage to the next.
![Hiya Health’s story page explaining how the brand started when its founders were shocked about the contents of children’s vitamins.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/hiyahealth.png?v=1739139851)
2. Analyze the top conversion path report to see what platforms people use at each stage
An omnichannel strategy or multichannel strategy is critical, as consumers often require multiple touchpoints along multiple channels or platforms before they eventually pull the trigger.
People might find your business through a referral on social media. They might read your tweets or browse your Instagram. Then, they might head back to your site for more—all before handing over their credit card. As a result, it’s also more critical than ever to optimize people’s experience as they move from one platform to the next.
Knowing the typical paths on your site is one thing, but it’s another to understand when and why customers use different channels before buying.
Note these different channels and their specific order sequencing before purchase. If you notice that social plays a huge role in awareness, add that to your buyer’s journey. You can later tap into this customer data and share content on social that focuses on brand building rather than selling, like Rare Beauty:
![Paper with the words “You are not defined by a photo, like, or comment” posted on Instagram.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/rarebeauty.png?v=1739139851)
LaCkore Couture takes this one step further by prioritizing two metrics: average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV). Founder Erin LaCkore says, “We primarily use Triple Whale to gather in-depth insights about our customer behavior and purchasing patterns. Complementing this, Google Analytics lets us understand traffic sources, time spent on our site, and other key metrics. All this data is visualized and simplified in Google Data Studio, allowing our team to draw actionable insights at a glance.”
Erin adds that by using a combination of these data points she gets a snapshot of the average spend each time a customer shops and the total projected revenue from a single customer over their relationship with the brand. “Based on AOV and CLV, we adjust our value ladder,” she says. “Introducing mid-tier products, bundle offers, or customer loyalty programs ensures customers feel they’re getting immense value, while we ensure profitability.”
If you’re a Shopify merchant, you can access our custom Google Data Studio reports in our Data Analysis course to help you find your metrics that lead to a sale. There you can see how many sessions the average user undertakes before making a purchase, and how many days it takes on average to make a purchase. You can further segment this by demographics or traffic source.
![AND](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/googledatastudio.png?v=1739139851)
3. Mold your customer journey to the needs of your visitors
The decision to purchase ultimately comes down to one major thing: your relationship with your customers.
Customer data analysis will help you uncover what your customers care most about. Then it’s your job to serve them the content, products, and offers in line with their desires. If prospective customers aren’t ready to buy, they won’t. And even if they are motivated, the wrong trigger or ability could limit their potential to slide down your funnel.
Use your first-party data to create personalized storefronts. Consider adding:
- Self-service features like order tracking and returns
- Wish list functionality
- Personalized product recommendations
- Saved shopping carts
- Custom collection pages based on interests
For example, if you’re an outdoors brand, you could use customer account data to show different homepage layouts to hikers versus campers. Hikers see trail gear collections first, while campers see tent and sleeping bag recommendations.
Only after customer journey mapping can you test different types of content and offers at each stage. For example, test a storytelling email versus an offer as your email autoresponse when someone first signs up. Or, try split testing your remarketing campaigns with blog posts, “About Us” videos, and offers.
Similarly, perhaps your customer retention strategy would be more effective if you had a weekly storytelling email with a softer call to action, or a stronger one.
Apps like StoreView or Klaviyo can guide this testing. Personalization platforms like Nosto also integrate beautifully with Shopify, allowing you to provide personalized shopping experiences based on previous touchpoints at scale—no manual data entry required.
![Image of Nosto’s content personalization platform on Shopify.](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0817/7988/4088/files/nosto.png?v=1739139851)
Monitor your overall customer journey to anticipate—and resolve—customer needs
Buying has never been more complex, because there’s never been this number of ecommerce platforms, channels, options, alternatives, or competitors.
If you want to grow your business, take a deep look at your customer personas and their journey. Customer journey maps should be adjusted on a monthly or quarterly basis to answer the questions “How can we add more value to our visitors at each step of this journey?” or “How can we help customers at each stage achieve their goals more easily?”
The brands that win do more than just sell products—they consistently deliver value throughout the customer journey. When you pair deep customer insights with Shopify's commerce tools, you create experiences that naturally lead to growth.
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