E-commerce customer journey is the term that describes the stages of a customer’s experience with an online business, from the moment they first become aware of its products through the moment they complete a purchase. The customer journey is the path of experiences your customers get. You can leave things to chance and let the customer journey go its natural course. This doesn’t guarantee significant results. 

Nowadays the customer journey for buyers is not exactly the straight line according to special algorithms, the buying process is more complicated than it was in the past when people spend time and interact with them in the physical store.

“Experiences are more important than products now. In fact, experiences are products.”

Importance of E-commerce Customer Journey

E-commerce customer journey mapping is important for small businesses as it helps to track the steps a customer follows to perform an action on your website, platforms, or application. The journey maps help identify the impediments across the touchpoints and devices and understand the visitor’s psychology, which, in turn, lends a hand at mending the broken parts of the customer experience.

Here’s a Quick Rundown of the Main Reasons:

• Reveals how your customers are interacting with your business.
• Highlights what customers need.
• Shows how your value proposition matches the reality of the customer experience.
• Clarifies needs and pain points.
• Helps to identify high-level issues with the customer journey.
• Enables to target resources for maximum returns.

5 Stages of E-commerce Customer Journey

The customer journey begins with discovering the product from an e-commerce shop ending with engagement, needed to be carefully managed – use the right channels for interaction at each stage, watch the frequency of communication, create meaningful touchpoints, control the outcome of each step so it leads to the next. An e-commerce 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. 

Discovery. At this stage, you can learn where customers are coming from, what usually brought them to your website, which pages they’re navigating to, and the path that took them from one page to another. This stage gives you a great opportunity to learn what new customers need and what they’re looking for on your site, and what preferences they have.

Interests. This stage presents an opportunity to learn how to help customers find what they’re looking for. At this stage, you may try to figure out how to reduce bounce rates on your main pages and to get prospects to browse more products. 

Intent. The customer adds items to a wish list or shopping cart, but they’re still considering the purchase. Online businesses may be able to identify which page features are working and what is getting prospects to add products to their wish lists and shopping carts. 

Purchase. This is when the customer buys your product. At this stage, you can identify opportunities to better serve them in the future. This part of the journey is also a great time to run a post-purchase survey and get quick feedback on what worked for people who have made a purchase. 

Engagement. At this point, you want new customers to become engaged customers. This is a good time to encourage customers to participate on social media, get email list sign-ups, and share helpful resources and articles. This stage presents an opportunity to get the customer to come back to browse more products and to become an advocate for your brand.

How E-commerce Stores Can Improve Customer Experience?

Improving your customer experience is critical to the success and growth of your business. Before you begin implementing these more specific tactics, it’s important to take a step back to determine the most effective way of doing so for your customers.

A customer-centric way of doing business is focused on providing a positive customer experience before and after the sale in order to drive repeat business, enhance customer loyalty and improve your business growth. The key to optimizing your e-commerce customer experience is understanding everything there is to know about your customers’ path to purchase.

Final Thoughts

In this early stage, your customers will be in a discovery mindset. They will browse categories to find the product/service they want. It’s important that they find what they want in a minimum of time so they don’t have to change the website. To stay ahead of the game, you need a unique offering that sets you apart from the rest of the competitors. As a digital marketing agency focused on e-commerce, we can help you provide a stellar customer experience to achieve your goals.

A customer experience journey is specific to the physical experiences your customers have. Therefore, the best way to understand the customer experience journey of your customers is by asking them, especially in this world of technology, digital customer experience journey and digital customer experience journey mapping have become more and more important which helps you to save time and get the mind of your customers faster and give you diverse useful information.

Your e-commerce website is for your customers. By learning more about their behavior and needs you’ll be closer to giving them the clearest, smoothest path on their customer journey.