A new customer first spotted your brand after seeing a friend share your post on social media. They visited your website, signed up for your email list, and visited your store… but only purchased after they compared their options on a marketplace.
Modern retail customer journeys look something like this. They no longer take place on just a single channel—instead spanning multiple touchpoints over an extended timeframe.
Yet there’s a mismatch between the current customer journey and the experiences that retailers offer. Customers struggle to jump from one channel to another, largely because the operations that a retailer has in place don’t support this level of cross-channel complexity. At least that’s the case for brands not built on Shopify.
Unified commerce solves these challenges so you can offer seamless customer experiences across the entire customer journey at scale. This guide shares how.
What is the retail customer journey?
The retail customer journey is the experience that people have when buying with a brand. Each touchpoint is plotted onto a map to visualize the channels they use during their purchase decision, including both online (such as ecommerce and ads) and offline (through in-store and events) customer interactions.
Omnichannel retail strategies meet customers wherever they are, at whichever stage of the journey they’re lingering in. It requires the unifying all sales channels into one seamless experience—not just for customers, but for the retailers managing these experiences.
Stages of the retail customer journey
The retail customer journey spans five main categories: awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty. Let’s explore the defining moments and characteristics of each stage.
Awareness
Customers start their journey when they first become aware of your brand. The touchpoint is their first initial engagement, whether that’s an impression on social media, a recommendation from a friend, or noticing your storefront as they walk by.
First-party data helps you pinpoint exactly where potential customers enter the awareness stage of your retail customer journey. It also gives you data to use for future retail marketing strategies that nudge them further along the funnel.
For example, if you notice that 30% of customers enter the awareness stage after a recommendation from a friend, perhaps you could invite that person to join your customer loyalty program and incentivize them to make more word-of-mouth referrals. This would widen the net of people entering your funnel by leveraging those already within it.
💡Tip: Shopify automatically creates a unified customer profile whenever someone shares their phone number or email address with your brand. Any supplementary data you collect, whether through a Shopify feature or app, funnels back to this unified customer profile.
You’ll get a 360-degree view of your shoppers and a detailed breakdown of every interaction you’ve had with them, which is referenceable from your Shopify POS dashboard.
Research
Customers progress to the research stage when they’re evaluating their purchase. At this point, they might not necessarily be aware of which solution they’ll opt for. They’re likely comparing products, reading reviews, visiting websites, and browsing in-store to find the right product for them.
Again, collect first-party data throughout the awareness stage to personalize your outreach. If an email subscriber has clicked your “best gifts for moms” product page on your online store, for example, store associates can use this customer data to recommend bestselling gifts when the customer next visits a retail location.
Purchase
Customers arrive at this stage of the customer journey when they’ve made the decision to buy. The main touchpoint is the checkout process—whether this happens through your ecommerce website, a retail store, a marketplace, or a social media storefront.
It’s your job to assist customers throughout this stage and make the process as seamless as possible. Offer multiple payment options, reference social proof to reinforce that they’re making the right decision, and make support easy to find, whether through live chat or in-store assistance.
It’s not uncommon for people to retreat back to the research stage at this point. Studies estimate that over 70% of online carts are abandoned; in-store shoppers might also leave your retail location if they’re not sold on their purchase. Retarget these people with campaigns that remind them of the product they’ve abandoned, ideally with an incentive—such as free shipping or a discount code—that inspires them to take action.
Post-purchase
A customer’s journey isn’t over once they’ve placed their first order. Customers interact with brands during an extended time between placing an order and receiving their product—which can happen through retail with ship-to-home fulfillment options.
If customers do take their product home immediately, keep the conversation going. Use apps like Shopify Email or Klaviyo to automatically send follow-up emails to ask if they’re enjoying their product. If it’s a complex or complicated product, offer guidance on how to get the most value from their purchase. It’s these small things that surprise and delight customers after they’ve paid for an order.
Loyalty
Customers enter the loyalty stage when they’ve made multiple purchases. Common touchpoints include omnichannel loyalty programs, word-of-mouth referral schemes, and registering for a subscription.
Lola’s Cupcakes, for example, launched the Lola’s Love Club—a loyalty program built using the Smile app integration. The goal is to let customers earn and redeem points wherever they shop. To make this possible, store staff rely on customer account data inside Shopify’s unified profiles.
“Before migrating to Shopify, we were spending tens of thousands of pounds a month just to keep operating the website, employ developers and run a bespoke checkout, which was simply too much investment,” says managing director Asher Budwig.
With no operational complexity, thanks to the technology working natively with one another, the brand reduced its total cost of ownership by over 50% when migrating to Shopify, all while welcoming 10,000 new customers to Lola’s Love Club.
Why map the customer retail journey?
A customer journey map is one of the most important documents that a retailer owns because it helps:
- Identify pain points. With each interaction mapped out to the stage a customer is in the funnel, you can pinpoint friction (e.g., unclear store layout or complicated online navigation) and fix it to help more customers flow through.
- Offer omnichannel consistency. Modern shoppers demand a seamless customer experience across everywhere they shop—including physical stores, websites, and social media. A customer journey map shows how customers switch between channels so you can meet them there with the messaging they’ll need to progress.
- Improve personalization. Retail customer journey maps tell you what customers want at each stage of the funnel. Use this data to tailor messaging, offers, and content to each stage.
- Boost customer retention. Many retailers think that the customer journey ends after a customer makes their first purchase. However, the final two stages of the funnel—post-purchase and loyalty—help you turn one-time shoppers into repeat buyers. It helps reduce your reliance on constantly finding new customers.
How to build a retail customer journey map
We know what the modern retail customer journey looks like and the importance of outlining one. Here’s what the process looks like, with tips and data sources to lean on when building yours.
1. Know what you want to improve
Before jumping into the buildout, think about what you want to improve within your retail business. This dictates the data you’ll collect in the customer journey map.
Perhaps you’re struggling to convince passersby to enter your store, so the number of people who enter your funnel is falling flat. In that case, use foot traffic data to measure how many people enter your store versus the average footfall in the store’s surrounding area.
2. Gather customer data
Instead of mapping the retail customer journey based on what you think is happening, data provides proof and uncovers trends you might not have otherwise known.
Establish data collection procedures that outline how you’ll gather, store, and retrieve customer data. This not only helps you centralize data, but helps you remain compliant with data protection regulations.
Shopify’s unified data model makes it easy to gather data into a centralized operating system. Inventory, order, and customer data flow back to the same dashboard, no matter where you sell. This includes data from any integrated apps—be that loyalty programs, email marketing platforms, or personalization tools—to give a complete 360-view of your customer.
Because POS and ecommerce are built on the same platform with Shopify, data is captured on the same system. There’s no need to contend with information that’s become out of date by the time you’ve imported it into your reporting dashboard, or fiddle around with patchy middleware that inflates costs and causes technical debt.
It’s no surprise that retailers using Shopify POS benefit from:
- 22% lower total cost of ownership, on average.
- 7% lower third-party support costs.
- The equivalent of an 8.9% uplift in annual sales.
3. Create customer profiles
Customer profiles compile the first-party data you’ve collected on each individual customer. This big-picture view lets you understand how people pass through the sales funnel, while giving you the opportunity to personalize any communication you have with them.
Shopify automatically generates a customer profile whenever a customer shares their phone number or email address with your business. Any supplementary information you collect on them (either online or offline) feeds back to this unified profile, such as:
- Email campaigns they’ve opened
- Products they’ve bought
- Retail stores they’ve bought from
- Customer feedback they’ve shared
- Loyalty points they’ve earned
Use data from these customer profiles to segment your audience based on traits they share. For example, you could divide customers by their shopping behavior. People who’ve visited your ecommerce website but always purchased in-store could receive a personalized email to attend an upcoming product workshop. They can skip the line and get guaranteed access to the event as a “thank you” for their loyalty.
Unified customer profiles also let retail associates tailor the shopping experience in-store. Staff working in Diane Von Furstenberg stores, for example, rely on Shopify POS to retrieve data stored in unified customer profiles to build a rapport with customers and offer personalized recommendations.
“If we weren’t using Shopify POS, I think our team would have a harder time building rapport with our customers and staying in touch with them,” says assistant store manager Joanna Puccio. “With Shopify, my staff can log customer information in one place and refer to it whenever they need. They can reach out to clients for things they’ll actually be interested in, which makes our customer experience feel so much more curated and personal.”
4. Identify touchpoints and channels
Unified customer profiles collate every piece of first-party data you’ve collected on your customers. Analyze this data to spot commonalities and trends. For example:
- On which sales channel do customers tend to have their first interaction?
- Which pages do people visit when they’re comparing their options?
- What pieces of content do they view immediately before converting?
- On which channel do they buy?
- What drives them to make their second (or third) purchase?
Plot these trends on a retail customer journey map in chronological order. This visual representation shows how people progress from one stage to the next, and the touchpoints and channels they lean on at each point.
5. Plot emotions and pain points
It’s great to know what actions people demonstrate throughout their customer journey, but even better to understand why.
Most decisions are based on emotion as opposed to logic. Survey your audience and analyze their behavior to plot the driving force behind each interaction throughout their customer journey. Amongst the most powerful are:
- Desire
- Pride
- Excitement
- Fear
- Guilt
These emotions guide you towards uncovering the pain point behind a purchase. If fear is a driving force for someone who progresses from the research to the purchase stage, what are they trying to avoid? Reverse engineer your outreach to address this fear and use it as a tool to propel shoppers forward.
6. Come up with improvement ideas
At this point, you have the full end-to-end view of the typical retail customer journey, including the pain points, touchpoints, and emotions a shopper experiences at each stage. Use this as an opportunity to plug any leaks.
Monitor the conversion rate between each stage of the funnel. Identify the flow with the lowest conversion—this is an area that customers tend to get stuck. Use the data to find out why. If that’s between the post-purchase and loyalty phases, for example, you might find that open rates for emails that invite customers to your loyalty program are low. Experiment with the subject line to see which variants convince customers to click.
7. Test and refine your approach
Customer journey maps are living documents that evolve as your retail business grows. Customer preferences and market trends are constantly changing; the marketing strategies that nudge people through the sales funnel become less effective as new tactics and retail technologies emerge.
Make a conscious effort to continually check in with your data. What do store managers say about the people visiting your store? What do customers say they want? What stops them from progressing from one stage of the shopping journey to the next?
The answers let you innovate on new ideas and keep your personalization efforts fresh—which is key in today’s competitive landscape where customers have more choices than ever before.
Tools to power the retail customer journey
Shopify commerce platform
Shopify is the only platform where POS and ecommerce are built on the same foundation, with a unique unified data model that helps you uncover valuable insights to drive your business forward. Whether you're collecting customer data in-store, managing inventory from suppliers, or processing marketplace transactions, you get complete visibility into your business performance without the complexity of managing multiple systems.
Shopify POS
Shopify POS is the combination of hardware and software that retailers use to operate physical stores. But because POS is built on the same infrastructure as other sales channels (including online channels such as ecommerce and marketplaces), it’s easy to bridge the gap between online and offline touchpoints within the retail customer journey.
Home furnishings brand Jenni Kaye, for example, knows that the average customer journey spans months. Its products are investment pieces. As its director of home experience Sam Mella says, “You don’t buy a living room overnight. But if we had insights about these customers based on our previous interactions online and in-person, then we could follow up and thoughtfully guide them through the purchasing journey.”
Jenni Kaye uses Shopify POS to unify inventory, customer, and transaction data from its network of retail stores and thriving ecommerce website. It can treat retail locations as showrooms for customers to interact with its furniture in the flesh, then use ship-to-home inside Shopify POS to take a customer’s order in-store and have the item shipped directly to their home.
Data stored within Shopify’s unified customer profiles also allow store associates to personalize the retail experience. “We use tags to identify whether a client is part of our Trade Program, Home Membership Program, and other things like that,” says Sam. “So if a client is looking at sofas, pillows, or anything for the home and they’re not a member, then we can quickly and easily find that out and suggest the program to them, which is super useful.”
Shop Pay
Shop Pay is a mobile app that lets customers shop from a variety of Shopify merchants, track their shipments, and discover new retailers. And because it’s built on the same platform that powers POS and ecommerce, you can collate accurate sales data and customer insights without complex integrations or implementation.
Shop Pay also gives customers more flexibility in how they shop. Online, they can store their payment details inside Shop’s secure digital wallet—a feature proven to bolster conversion rates by up to 50% compared to guest checkout. In-store, they can pay for larger purchases in regular installments through Shop Pay Installments.
Shopify Analytics
Reliable analytics are the foundation of any customer journey map. Only when you have concrete evidence to support your hypothesis can you identify exactly how customers engage with your brand throughout their shopping journey.
Shopify Analytics collates data from your integrated sales channels—including POS, ecommerce, and marketplaces—to give the big picture view of your customers. Choose from over 60 prebuilt reports or create your own custom data exploration to surface metrics that matter most to your business.
Plus, with Shopify Analytics, you can track and analyze campaign performance. Spot which channels that don’t just drive the most traffic, but have the highest conversion rates. This lets you double-down on what’s working—and readjust campaigns that aren’t.
Create personalized retail customer journeys with Shopify
The modern retail customer journey is anything but linear. Customers have more choice than ever, and own a range of devices that assist them with their purchase decisions. It’s your job to understand this journey and meet customers where they are.
Shopify gives scaling retailers the tools they need to sell omnichannel. It goes beyond traditional omnichannel commerce by streamlining the backend operations required to sell wherever your customers are. You get accurate, real-time data across your entire business, so you can reduce the complexity of operations and make smarter business decisions that power growth.
Retail customer journey FAQ
What is a customer journey in retail?
The customer journey in retail is the map a typical customer takes, from first becoming aware of a brand to becoming a loyal shopper. But retail customer journeys aren’t just specific to offline channels—most customers have online and offline touchpoints within their journey.
What are the 5 stages of the customer journey?
The five stages of the customer journey are:
- Awareness
- Research
- Purchase
- Post-purchase
- Loyalty
How do you map a customer journey?
Here’s the step-by-step process to map a customer journey:
- Know what you want to improve
- Gather customer data
- Create unified customer profiles
- Identify touchpoints and channels
- Plot emotions and pain points
- Come up with improvement ideas
- Test and refine your customer journey
What is the difference between customer journey and customer flow?
The customer journey is the end-to-end experience that someone has with a business, from initial discovery to becoming a repeat customer. The customer flow describes how people progress from one stage of the journey to the next.
