Master Ecommerce Customer Experience for Your Business

What is an ecommerce customer experience and how can you create a great one? Learn everything you need to know in this article.

Online shopping has far surpassed the simple transaction of click and buy. Customers move between various touchpoints at one time, and expect a consistent customer experience wherever they go.

Delivering an outstanding customer experience today relies on unified data. But not just any data—first-party data, like purchase history, browsing behavior, and support interactions. A recent report from Deloitte found that 61% of high-growth companies are shifting toward first-party data for their personalization strategies.

By centralizing all your data into a commerce platform like Shopify, you eliminate data silos and gain a complete view of each shopper. Only then can you provide truly delightful customer experiences that earn you more revenue.

Ahead, you’ll learn the basics of an ecommerce customer experience. and tips for improving yours in the upcoming year.

What is ecommerce customer experience?

Ecommerce customer experience (CX) is the sum of every digital interaction a shopper has with your brand, from discovering your products to completing checkout and beyond. It’s about creating an enjoyable, frictionless experience for anyone who visits your store and engages with your brand. 

In practice, it means anticipating what online shoppers want at every touchpoint, whether they’re reading product descriptions, navigating the checkout process, or contacting support. With Shopify, retailers can unify essential CX elements in one platform, including merchandising, site design, checkout, and even automated marketing, and pinpoint friction points and fix them quickly. 

Brands that unify these touchpoints see impressive results. EY’s POS market report found that retailers report an 8.9% boost in annual GMV by leveraging first-party data to drive meaningful shopping journeys. 

Why is it important to have a customer experience strategy?

It influences sales

Shoppers today expect personalized shopping experiences, and they vote with their wallets when retailers deliver. According to a 2023 Forrester survey, 67% of US online consumers rated their brand experiences as merely “okay,” and only 19% said they were “good,” while 0% said “excellent.” 

This gap between customer expectations and reality represents a huge opportunity: getting your experience right can differentiate you from competitors who underdeliver.

Data from Shopify Audiences indicates that tapping into first-party data and pooling customer insights can lower customer acquisition costs by up to 50%. By building a unified picture of who your buyers are, you create relevant, timely experiences that drive higher conversion rates and repeat purchases. 

It keeps you ahead of the competition

A 2024 IDC poll revealed that 74% of respondents want to better understand their customers’ preferences and behaviors, and 72% want to expand their reach to new customer segments. 

That means your competitors are actively trying to do the same. Implementing a robust customer experience management (CEM) strategy, which encompasses everything from checkout optimization to personalized content, helps you stay a step ahead. You’re continuously collecting customer feedback, refining your approach, and delivering meaningful interactions that competitors can’t easily replicate.

It powers omnichannel growth

Ecommerce doesn’t exist on one channel. It happens through social media, influencer campaigns, your online store, and even in person. Retailers who unify data across channels see up to 150% year-over-year growth in omnichannel sales. 

When your data lives in one core customer model, you can automate these workflows, keep messaging consistent, and measure performance all from a single dashboard. That end-to-end visibility accelerates omnichannel success and guarantees your brand shows up everywhere customers expect you to be.

How to improve ecommerce customer experience

To help your ecommerce business find new customers, build brand loyalty, and improve a customer’s lifetime value, you’ll need to consider implementing some of the following behaviors moving through 2025 and beyond.

1. Centralize and enrich customer data

One of the biggest hurdles for personalized marketing is data siloed across multiple tools. Adopting a single core customer model lets you integrate browsing history, purchase records, and demographic details into one source of truth.

Shopify’s unified customer data model helps create a more personalized experience. It collects all the data you’ve collected on customers, like:

• Their location
• Links they’ve clicked in an email campaign
• In-store sales recorded on your POS system
• Responses submitted to a post-purchase feedback survey 
• Preferred shipping and payment methods

Shopify is an all-in-one commerce operating system for ecommerce brands.

When you leverage first-party data, you create a more complete picture of who buyers are. A unified system cuts down on repetitive data entry and missed connections. You’ll also get immediate benefits like more accurate segmenting and improved targeting, leading to higher engagement and conversions.

2. Use advanced acquisition tactics

In the face of tighter privacy restrictions and fading third-party cookies, co-op-style data helps you target genuinely interested audiences. 

Shopify Audiences lets you share anonymized, first-party data with a cooperative pool of merchants. In return, you gain lookalike and retargeting opportunities once reserved for giant retailers, lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC) by up to 50%. 

This saves your marketing dollars, plus helps reach shoppers who are more likely to love your products—and that translates into a smoother, more relevant experience for new customers who discover you through ads that actually match their interests.

To build on that, Shop Campaigns leverages these same insights to highlight your brand in the Shop app, where loyal, high-intent buyers browse and discover new favorites. By surfacing your products to customers already in “shopping mode,” it delivers a smoother, more relevant path from discovery to checkout. 

3. Use AI to create automated customer services

Artificial intelligence is beginning to make big waves in customer experience. From AI-based chatbots to predictive analytics and data-driven personalization, there are many use cases across retail. 

These f chatbots use a form of AI called natural language processing (NLP) to learn how to have a more “human” conversation with customers, as opposed to using a set of preselected responses. The result is a more engaging and satisfying experience for potential customers.

Another area AI is helping customer experience is data-driven personalization—simply put, AI is able to sort through and analyze data on a much larger scale than any human could. With access to vast amounts of data, marketers can use it to provide more effective ad-targeting and product recommendations at various touchpoints.

4. Using AR to elevate the customer experience

The use of AR for improving customer experience has a lot of potential in the coming years, with greater adoption in mainstream markets. This is primarily thanks to social media apps, and Deloitte research suggests 75% of the global population will be frequent AR users in 2025, largely discovering it through social media on smartphones.

Brands can take advantage of AR by using it for virtual try-ons of their products. For example, Christian Dior uses Snapchat and Instagram AR filters.

In a similar vein, brands can use AR to “showroom” products such as home furnishings to help online customers see how products will look in their homes before buying them. Research we conducted last year, for example, found merchants who add 3D AR previews to their stores see a 94% conversion lift on average.

These AR features are improving digital experiences by delivering real-time customer interactions with products they’re looking to buy, resulting in less churn and better serving customer needs.

5. Improvements to the packaging and return experience

The post-purchase experience is just as important as everything that comes before. Customers care about packaging as well as the returns experience.

On the packaging front, sustainability is at the forefront of customers’ minds—with 19% of Insider Intelligence respondents reporting minimal packaging for shipping is extremely important, and a further 19% saying brands taking steps to offset their carbon footprint is also extremely important.

However, packaging is not only a chance to prove sustainability values, it’s also a chance to further develop brand representation and convenience. Even if the packaging is great, some customers are still going to want to return a product.

Brands can help improve the returns experience, and inspire customer loyalty, by reframing returns as a win-win for customers and themselves. To make great returns a reality, brands can incentivize customers to return products quickly to get them back in active stock, as well as offer drop-off points rather than forcing customers to print shipping labels at home.

6. Virtual store/brand experiences

Along similar lines to improvements in the adoption of AR experiences, virtual reality (VR) is also making some headway in offering outside-the-box customer experiences. The major difference between AR and VR, however, is that customers using VR need additional VR-ready hardware to maximize its effectiveness, which slows down the adoption rate compared to AR.

One example of a brand using VR to push digital initiatives is Maybelline. The brand launched a Halloween-themed VR experience called Maybelline Virtual Loft in October, where visitors could try on Halloween makeup looks, explore products, and play a virtual scavenger hunt.

More along the lines of education, Walker Slater threw their hat into the ring by having a dedicated VR user experience in their London flagship store where customers could transport themselves to the Scottish Hebrides and explore where the brand’s wool comes from. Graham Clark, director of marketing at British Wool (speaking to Glossy) said VR is an effective way to attract Gen Z customers.

7. Personalized storefront experiences

The more a storefront reflects a shopper’s personal tastes, the more likely they are to purchase. 

Gaining a logged-in customer is an important factor in customizing ecommerce experiences. Once buyers develop the habit of signing in, you can tailor every interaction to what matters most to them. That could mean spotlighting relevant collections when they land on your homepage, or automatically applying their loyalty status (e.g., VIP tiers, store credit) at checkout. 

Instead of bombarding shoppers with generic “You might also like…” popups, focus on meaningful ways to personalize the journey—such as early access to new arrivals for high-value customers, or a birthday discount that feels more like a thoughtful gift than a promotional ploy. 

The goal is to recreate the experience of a helpful in-store associate—someone who recognizes repeat visitors, recalls their preferences, and suggests items in a context that feels both natural and appreciated.

8. Better checkout and payment options

A smooth, secure checkout can make or break your sale. According to research from the Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, often because checkout feels confusing or time-consuming, or lacks the payment methods shoppers prefer. 

That’s why Shopify Checkout, backed by Shop Pay, outperforms competitors by an average of 15% in conversion rates, and why leading merchants like Allbirds, Gymshark, and Sennheiser rely on it to power millions of transactions.

The fewer steps shoppers need to take, the more likely they’ll complete their purchase. Many Shopify merchants opt for a one-page or highly optimized checkout, keeping only essential fields (shipping info, billing address, payment details). Others adopt a two- or three-step checkout but highlight a progress bar, or “breadcrumbs,” to show customers exactly where they are in the process. Either way, the goal is the same: speed up and simplify.

Tentree’s checkout stands out by letting shoppers see their order details at a glance while also choosing to plant trees with each purchase. This eco-friendly option aligns perfectly with the brand’s environmental mission, and the added bonus of order protection further shows they value both customers and the planet.

Tentree’s checkout not only lets you complete your purchase, but also gives you the chance to protect your order and even offset your carbon footprint.

Each customer’s payment preference is different—some trust credit cards, others prefer digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, or Shop Pay Installments. Offering flexible payment options up front can reduce abandoned carts by reassuring shoppers you can handle transactions however they want to pay.

9. Better fulfillment and delivery times

Consumers are becoming ever more accustomed to fast deliveries, with ultra-rapid delivery apps such as Glovo and Zapp raising expectations.

While these apps largely deal with local grocery store and fast-food deliveries, Amazon has led the way for next-day and same-day deliveries in the ecommerce market. However, the ecommerce boom of 2020 has put strain on third-party logistics (3PL) businesses to meet these high customer demands while keeping pricing competitive. Analysis from McKinsey & Company suggests a solution for better 3PL fulfillment moving forward: an integrated multi-client model.

The folks at McKinsey & Company explain the multi-client fulfillment model can help 3PL businesses remain competitive by using technology and automation where possible, and sharing activities and resources across clients to create significant cost savings. Ultimately, these methods of fulfillment can help reduce lead times on delivery to compete with the two-day and same-day deliveries offered by market leaders like Amazon.

Moving forward in 2025, ecommerce businesses can look out for fulfillment providers utilizing this strategy to help their products reach customers faster and improve customer retention.

10. Further enhanced marketing personalization

Lead capture doesn’t have to be limited to “Sign up for 10% off.” Think bigger: offer loyalty points, gated content, or store credit when shoppers opt in. 

Capturing leads before they even make a purchase can jumpstart a deeper relationship, especially if you’re gathering data that can shape future personalization. For instance, a quick quiz or preference survey can inform product recommendations, or even a custom welcome email sequence tailored to their tastes.

Once you’ve collected the right data, automation becomes your personalization engine. Features like triggers and conditions in Shopify Flow allow you to run hypertargeted messages at just the right moment. Think post-purchase thank-yous, back-in-stock alerts, or VIP-only promos. These keep you relevant and top of mind without resorting to generic, spammy blasts. 

Shoppers feel recognized when your outreach speaks directly to them, not just a broad audience. By treating lead capture as the opening act of personalization, you’re building a foundation that keeps customers engaged well beyond their first visit.

11. Increased self-servicing

The first trend mentioned in this article was improving (and greater adoption of) AI chatbots, which is one method of many self-servicing options customers want to use.

Customers don’t want to have to contact a customer service agent for every question they have about a product or service, especially for online businesses. The sixth edition of Salesforce’s State of Service report revealed that high-performing organizations are more likely than underperformers to provide tools like knowledge-powered help centers, customer self-service portals, and chatbots powered by AI.

Besides the aforementioned chatbots, ecommerce companies can build good customer experience by creating robust knowledge bases (with a dedicated team to keep the knowledge updated), as well as community forums where customers can help each other—this can also help build a loyal brand community, which drives consumer engagement, as a bonus.

Moving into 2025 and beyond, consumers will have great customer experiences when they can choose how to connect with your brand, whether through live assistance or self-service options, when they have a question or issue.

How to measure customer experience 

Measuring the ecommerce customer experience starts with platform analytics. For example, you can use Shopify Analytics or partner solutions to track conversions, abandoned carts, and repeat purchases in real time. You’ll view data in real time and be able to spot customer pain points or big wins as they happen.

Some metrics to measure include:

• Website usage: Identify which landing pages or blog posts capture attention, and which pages lead to exits.
• Conversion flow: Pinpoint where customers drop out of the checkout process or abandon carts.
• Return rates: High return rates for a certain product could point to a quality or expectation mismatch.
• Popular products: See what’s consistently selling well to refine future product or marketing investments.

Shopify Benchmarks let you see how your store’s key metrics compare to other stores of similar size and product categories. You’ll get data on online store conversion, average order value, retention rate, and fulfillment times, all from real merchants, not generic industry averages. 

For example, if your online store conversion is at 4% but the top 25% of similar stores hit 6%, that gap shows where you can aim your efforts. Or, if your average order value outperforms peers, you might focus on boosting repeat purchases next.

Finally, run A/B tests (e.g., tweaking checkout steps or personalization features) and measure the before-and-after impact on key performance indicators like conversion rate or average order value. A data-focused approach helps you know exactly how well you’re delivering on customer experience and where to improve next.

Examples of excellent ecommerce customer experience

Tomilson’s

Tomlinson’s, a family-owned pet supplies business with 18 retail stores, unified their online and offline operations by switching to Shopify POS. Through streamlined checkout and discounting, they reduced in-store checkout times by 56% and taps by 46%, making the experience faster for both shoppers and staff.

Their Pet Club membership perks are now automatically applied, removing manual steps and ensuring consistent discounts whether customers shop online or in-store. Plus, staff training time dropped 32%, so new employees can deliver smoother, friendlier service right away.

Overall, Tomlinson’s created a better customer journey by offering a seamless, efficient checkout process, unified purchase history, and effortless savings. It’s a great example of how the right POS and ecommerce platform, tailored with custom logic, can quickly elevate convenience and customer satisfaction.

“Shopify has done a really good job expanding beyond the direct-to-consumer (DTC) niche into building tools that allow customers of any market vertical to build what they need to serve their business’s unique needs.”

Kate Knecht — Owner & Operator, Tomlinson's

Angelus

Angelus, a century-old shoe-care brand, unified all sales channels through Shopify, shifting from 100% wholesale to a thriving direct-to-consumer model. This helped them build a direct relationship with end customers and provide real-time inventory tracking across online, wholesale, and in-store channels.

Angelus saw a tenfold increase in global sales, two to three times higher profit margins, and a brand-new retail experience where customers can buy in person or pick up online orders.

By making purchasing seamless, whether someone’s browsing their ecommerce site or walking into the store, Angelus now caters to how today’s shoppers actually buy. They even turned their retail space into an experiential classroom for shoe customization workshops, deepening their connection with loyal fans.

Allbirds

Allbirds tackled the challenge of aligning online and in-store inventory by adding Ship from Store to their existing Shopify POS setup, creating a unified commerce experience. Before this, only warehouse stock appeared online, causing missed sales and costly warehouse returns on unsold store inventory.

By letting each of their 31 retail locations fulfill online orders, Allbirds made more items instantly available for purchase, boosting website conversion rates and cutting shipping and labor costs for end-of-season returns.

For customers, it’s a major win: more styles and sizes stay available, plus orders often arrive faster when shipped from a nearby store rather than a centralized warehouse. It also supports a true omnichannel approach: shoppers can buy, pick up, or return items wherever it’s most convenient.

Make the most of your ecommerce customer experience

Whether you’re a seasoned retailer with a global customer base or planning to expand your operations, if you’re following the trends above, you’ll create a memorable experience for online shoppers.

Remember that the success of your ecommerce experience depends on your customers. Be everywhere they are, with convenient and seamless shopping experiences—including simplified checkout and follow-up. You’ll soon see the benefits of happier customers and more sales.

Ecommerce customer experience FAQ

Why is customer experience in ecommerce important?

Customer experience in ecommerce is important because it allows customers to have a positive experience when interacting with a company online. A positive customer experience can lead to repeat customers and positive word of mouth for the company.

How can I improve my ecommerce experience?

There are a few key things you can do to improve your ecommerce experience. First, focus on delivering a fast, smooth, and easy-to-use checkout process. Second, make sure your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate on all devices.

What are the 3 levels of customer experience?

The three levels of customer experience are engagement, interaction, and fulfillment.

What is ecommerce customer engagement?

Ecommerce customer engagement is the process of building a relationship with a customer through interaction and activity. This interaction can take many forms, such as providing customer support, offering personalized content, or simply communicating regularly with the customer.