Ecommerce Customer Journey 101: Definition, Maps, and Tips to Drive More Conversions

Ever spent ages crafting the perfect message for your ecommerce customers only to see it flop? The tone, the offer, the personalization—all spot on—yet it still misses the mark. It happens. Even the right message at the wrong time can turn potential buyers away.

To truly win over customers, you need to understand the ecommerce customer journey down to a T. 

Every touchpoint matters. 

At Elogic, we excel at optimizing these journeys to enhance customer experiences and drive results. 

In this article, we’ll tell you everything we know about customer journeys in ecommerce, reveal key strategies to personalize and optimize every stage, share tips for effective customer journey mapping, and show you how to elevate your ecommerce game. 

What Is an Ecommerce Customer Journey? 

The ecommerce customer journey is the path a customer takes from first hearing about your product to finally making a purchase (and ideally, becoming a repeat customer). 

Think of it as the storyline of how someone goes from “Who are you?” to “Take my money!” and then to “I’ll be back for more!”

To make it even clearer, imagine you’re shopping online for a new pair of sneakers. Your journey might look something like this:

• You see an ad for a sleek new pair of sneakers while scrolling through Instagram. 
• Intrigued, you click on the ad and check out the product details on the website. You read reviews, compare prices, and maybe even sign up for a newsletter to get a discount code.
• After a bit of thought, you decide to buy the sneakers and proceed to checkout.
• After your purchase, you receive an email confirming your order, another when it ships, and finally, a request for a review once you’ve had a chance to try them out.
• You love the sneakers and subscribe to their mailing list, follow them on social media, and consider buying again in the future.

In this sequence, you—as a hypothetical customer—cover the typical stages of the customer journey in ecommerce:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Conversion (purchase)
4. Retention (post-purchase interactions)
5. Loyalty (or brand advocacy, depending on how much you like the company and the products it offers)

Notice how this journey isn’t just about the purchase? It stretches beyond that, encompassing every single touchpoint a customer and the business have online and (less often in the ecommerce realm) offline: customer service interactions, social media engagement, potential in-store visits, and even word-of-mouth recommendations. 

Customer journey for ecommerce: B2B vs B2C vs C2C

Despite having a lot of common traits and generally going through the same stages, the journey isn’t identical for everyone and varies depending on the type of ecommerce business:

• B2C ecommerce customer journey: This is your standard online shopping experience. The customer journey tends to be straightforward and relatively short, from browsing to buying.
• B2B ecommerce customer journey: Because of the higher purchasing risk of the B2B landscape, the customer journey is usually more complex and takes longer. It involves multiple decision-makers, lots of research, and often a personalized sales process.
• C2C ecommerce customer journey: Think of platforms like eBay or Etsy, where individual sellers and buyers interact. The journey includes trust-building steps like seller ratings and reviews, and can often involve negotiation.

It’s vital to understand the difference between the three to excel at ecommerce customer journey mapping. 

5 Stages of the Customer Journey in Ecommerce

Ever wonder how your customers go from just hearing about your brand to becoming loyal advocates? 

Let’s take a closer look at these ecommerce customer journey stages, the wants and needs customers have at each of them, and the ways how businesses can meet those.

Awareness

The awareness stage is where potential customers first learn about your brand or products. At this point, they might not be actively looking to buy but are getting acquainted with what you have to offer. This stage is all about making a good first impression.

The things customers look for at this stage are pretty basic:

• Discovery: Customers are exploring their options and seeking solutions to a problem or desire they have.
• Information: They want clear, concise information about your products or services to understand how they can benefit.

To fulfill these wants, at the awareness stage of the journey, customers engage with social media ads, search for information on search engines, visit the brand’s website, and read blog posts or articles.

To meet these needs, ecommerce stores can invest in:

• Boosting brand visibility: Ensure your brand is visible across various platforms where your target audience hangs out. This can include social media, search engines, and relevant blogs or forums.
• Producing engaging content: Create engaging content that educates and interests potential customers. This could be informational landing pages, blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media updates.
• Nailing SEO: Optimize your website for search engines to ensure your content appears when potential customers are searching for related products or solutions.

For example, a B2C drink manufacturer of a soothing drink needed to overcome the concerns their target audience had regarding the drink and build a solid brand visibility from scratch. To complete those tasks and win the awareness stage of the ecommerce customer journey, they decided to use a website, social media ads, and a mailing list. 

Elogic helped a B2C drink manufacturer boost their brand awareness by quickly releasing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for their Shopify website. This allowed the client to launch a targeted marketing campaign, significantly increasing brand visibility and collecting leads through preorders. We also designed a highly informative landing page that clearly outlined the benefits and risks of the drink as well as instructions for consumption, meeting customers’ need for detailed information. 

Learn more about the client’s experience with Elogic, the challenges they had and the solutions they acquired with our help.

Here are some signs your ecommerce business is successfully addressing the awareness stage:

• Increased social media followers and engagement
• Higher website traffic
• Boost in newsletter subscribers
• More mentions and shares on social media platforms

If your marketing activities bring the anticipated results, at some point it will inevitably become too difficult to keep track of all those metrics across the different mediums. 

To streamline the process and ensure no data falls through the cracks, consider an integrated analytics system that will collect and centralize those engagement metrics. 

This will be a particularly useful addition for B2B brands dealing with a much more complex customer journey. 

Consideration

Consideration is the ecommerce website customer journey stage that follows awareness. That’s where potential customers actively evaluate your product or service, comparing it with others to determine the best fit for their needs.

During consideration, customers typically want to:

• Receive more details about the product’s features and benefits
• Compare the products with similar offerings from competitors 
• Check trust signals like reviews and ratings
• Gain answers to specific questions or concerns

To get these, they often read product reviews and ratings, watch product demo videos, check prices, compare different products on various websites, and engage with FAQs or chat support. 

To make the process easier for your customers and more successful for your brand:

• Provide detailed product information, including detailed descriptions, benefits, and features. Use bullet points for easy scanning.
• Showcase reviews and testimonials to build trust. Integrate ratings on your product pages.
• Create comparison guides that highlight the differences between your products and competitors’ products, helping customers make informed decisions.
• Use high-quality visuals and demo videos that show your product in action, helping customers visualize its benefits.
• Offer live chat support to answer any questions or concerns potential customers might have in real time.
• Build FAQs and knowledge base to address common questions and concerns.

Enzio Manufacturing, an Elogic client in industrial automation, improved their customer experience at the consideration stage enhancing UI/UX based on customer insights and creating intuitive navigation and a smart-tagged catalog page. AI-powered search features provided relevant results despite misspellings, while product and price sorting catered to different customer groups. Additionally, SAP ERP integration enabled better product tracking and real-time inventory updates.

All of this simplified information search for customers and, ultimately, resulted in a + 30% conversion rate. 

Read the full version of Enzio Manufacturing’s success story in our case study.

Look out for the following success indicators to confirm you’re doing consideration stage right:

• Customers engage with your products, including asking questions on product pages
• Increased time spent on your website
• Higher engagement with product comparisons and demo content

Acquisition / Conversion

If you’ve successfully guided leads through the customer journey ecommerce conversion funnel—capturing your leads’ attention and convincing them your product is worth purchasing,—they’ll now enter the conversion stage, also known as acquisition or purchase. 

The conversion stage is where potential customers become actual buyers. They finalize their decision and complete the purchase. This includes such actions as adding products to the shopping cart, reviewing cart items and prices, selecting shipping options, and completing the payment process.

At this stage, all customers want is:

• A secure and fast checkout process
• Clear pricing and payment options
• Assurance through guarantees and return policies
• Quick access to customer support if needed

To meet these needs and secure the transaction, ecommerce stores can:

• Simplify checkout, ensuring the process is fast and easy with minimal steps and a variety of payment options.
• Display clear and transparent pricing with no hidden costs.
• Highlight guarantees, warranties, and return policies to build confidence.
• Make customer support easily accessible through live chat, phone, or email.

Elogic helped Amsale, a luxury bridal house, create a smoother customer experience during the Conversion stage by developing a fully functional online store on Magento. This allowed Amsale to meet key customer needs such as a seamless checkout process, transparent pricing breakdowns, and easy appointment scheduling for fittings. They also ensured quick access to customer support directly from the checkout page. As a result, Amsale saw a significant increase in fitting appointments and overall sales.

Check out the details of Amsale’s collaboration with Elogic in the case study. 

You can claim you’ve made it if you see the following conversion stage success indicators:

• High conversion rates on first purchase
• Low cart abandonment rates
• Positive reviews and feedback left on your website

Retention

The customer journey in ecommerce doesn’t stop with the purchase completed. The next stage is retention. 

The retention stage of the customer journey ecommerce involves keeping existing customers engaged and satisfied, ensuring they return for future purchases and continue to interact with your brand.

“The top purchasing factors for consumers include product quality (51%) and past experiences with a product or brand (25%).”

🗣️ HubSpot’s 2024 Consumer Trends Report

Without excellent customer experience during the previous stages of the customer journey and utter satisfaction with the product they received, customers won’t even consider going further with your business. It’s non-negotiable. 

But there are also other things customers are looking for during the retention stage:

• Consistent and relevant communication
• Personalized recommendations for repeated purchase
• Exclusive offers and rewards
• Excellent customer service
• A sense of community and belonging

To accommodate those needs and increase the chances of customers sticking with your brand, pay attention to:

• Sending personalized emails with product recommendations, special offers, and updates based on their purchase history.
• Implementing a loyalty program that rewards repeat purchases and customer referrals.
• Providing top-notch customer service through various channels, including live chat, email, and phone.
• Sharing engaging content like newsletters, blog posts, and social media updates to keep customers interested.
• Fostering a sense of community through social media groups, forums, and events.

It’s super important to make the customer feel valued and celebrated. The best way to do it? Personalization! 

Read more: Personalization at Scale: How to Hook Your Customers & Boost Customer Lifetime Value 

Personalization should be the leitmotif of your communication with customers, with every element of it tailored to their personality, their customer behavior and preferences. But for that, you need data. And lots of it. 

Our client, Canadian Wine Club, took a unique approach to data collection. Upon their request, Elogic developed a gamified experience for their website, asking customers about their favorite food pairings, wine expertise level, budget, and preferred settings. This quiz generated a personalized wine tasting profile, leading to tailored wine suggestions and increased conversion rates by 20%.

Additionally, Elogic created a subscription-based ecommerce portal, allowing customers to join the wine club. Members can select their wine preferences, quantity, and delivery frequency, with options to pause, cancel, or change the subscription and enable recurring billing.

More about Elogic’s work with the Canadian Wine Club, including the obstacles we faced and the wins we had, in the detailed case study. 

Key indicators of successful customer management at the retention stage of the ecommerce customer journey include:

• High repeat purchase rates
• Active participation in loyalty programs
• Increase in customer referrals

When keeping track of retention numbers, it’s best to use a dedicated third-party tool like a CRM system. Integrate it with your ecommerce website to know exactly who re-orders what and when. 

Advocacy / Loyalty

Finally, if you manage to not only acquire customers but also keep them coming for more, your customers enter the advocacy (loyalty) stage of the ecommerce customer journey. 

The advocacy stage is where satisfied customers become enthusiastic promoters of your brand. They not only continue to buy from you but also act as brand ambassadors, actively recommending your products to others.

Of course, there are certain expectations customer have from the brand when recommending it to their audience:

• Recognition and appreciation for their loyalty
• Exclusive offers and rewards
• Easy ways to share their positive experiences
• Opportunities to engage with the brand community

If all of the aforementioned is available, they’ll be happily recommending your products to friends and family, sharing their experiences on social media, leaving positive reviews and feedback, and participating in loyalty programs and brand communities.

To grow the pool of loyal brand ambassadors, your ecommerce business should…

• Implement a loyalty program that offers rewards for repeat purchases and referrals.
• Offer loyal customers early access to new products, special discounts, or exclusive content.
• Provide incentives for customers to leave reviews and refer friends.
• Respond to reviews and comments, and show appreciation for customer advocacy.
• Create a community space, such as a social media group or forum, where customers can interact and share their experiences.

To turn customers into brand ambassadors, Carbon38 enlisted Elogic to develop the Team38 portal. This functionality allowed brand promoters to create personal pages, showcase matching sets, share their stories, and receive promo codes and commissions for their promotional efforts.

Learn more about this functionality and other Elogic developments for Carbon38 in the customer story!

To assess how well your ecommerce business does when it comes to the advocacy stage of the customer journey, look for the following cues:

• High referral rates
• Increased website traffic from social media (track in Google Analytics)
• Customers actively promoting your store on their channels
• Your products featured in media outlets and influencer posts

Why Is the Customer Journey Important?

We’re not going to sugarcoat it: putting together an ecommerce customer journey map is a long, cumbersome process that demands extensive research, resources, and meticulous attention to detail. It can take days, even weeks, of intense brainstorming and teamwork across all departments to develop an effective customer journey map for ecommerce.

But regardless of how tedious this task is, it’s mandatory you complete it. Understanding the customer journey your clients go through is an asset that can make or break your business. 

Right timing is the key to ecommerce success. You might spend hours crafting a perfect message, but it won’t make much difference if it reaches prospects at the wrong time. For what it’s worth, it might only scare them away. 

Knowing when and where to engage customers allows you to send the right message at the right time, which can significantly boost your conversion rates. For B2C, this could mean targeted promotions; for B2B, timely follow-ups and personalized offers. In fact, research by McKinsey states that personalized experiences can generate five to eight times more ROI on marketing spend and increase sales by at least 10%, 

So, you need to know the timeline of your prospects’ actions like the back of your hand. 

Here are some other reasons why customer journey ecommerce is important:

• Enhanced customer experience: According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 88% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Mapping out the customer journey helps you spot and eliminate friction points, making the experience smoother and more enjoyable. This is crucial for both B2C customers who want quick, hassle-free shopping and B2B clients who need detailed, personalized interactions. 

• Better resource allocation: A clear ecommerce customer journey map helps you allocate resources more efficiently, focusing on the touchpoints that matter most. This streamlines marketing efforts for B2C businesses and optimizes sales processes for B2B companies. 
• Improved customer retention: Understanding your customer’s journey helps you foster loyalty by continuously engaging them even after the purchase.
• Informed decision making: A study by Gallup suggests that businesses utilizing customer behavior data see an 85% higher sales growth and a more than 25% increase in gross margin compared to their competitors. A well-crafted customer journey map provides valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, guiding your business strategies and decision-making processes. 
• Competitive advantage: Mastering your customer journey allows you to differentiate yourself from competitors who might not be as in tune with their customers’ needs and behaviors. 

An ecommerce customer journey map is not just a fancy tool; it’s a strategic necessity. It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, enabling you to create more targeted, effective, and personalized interactions that drive conversions and build long-lasting relationships.

How to Build an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map 

Now that you’re aware of the numerous benefits of a customer journey map in ecommerce, you might be wondering how to map your ecommerce customer journey. 

Congrats, you came to the right place — we have all the answers! In this section, we’ll share the ins and outs of customer journey mapping for ecommerce that will help you develop an effective ecommerce customer journey map template and reap the benefits. 

Create customer personas

An ecommerce buyer persona and customer journey start with defining your ideal customers. Understanding who your customers are helps tailor the journey to their needs and preferences.

Read more: How to Create a Seamless Customer Experience in Ecommerce: Essential Tips 

While it’s quite a creative process — you’re literally creating a fictional character — it’s also incredibly data-driven. The last thing you want to do is to shoot in the dark, so you need to employ a wide range of different sources to learn as much as possible about the traits your ideal customers have in common. Gather data from customer surveys, interviews, web analytics, and CRM systems to get a comprehensive view of your audience.

The characteristics you’re looking for:

• Demographics: Include details like age, gender, location, education level, and occupation. This helps you understand the basic characteristics of your customers.
• Psychographics: Identify interests, values, hobbies, and lifestyle choices. These insights help you connect with customers on a deeper level.
• Buying behavior: Document purchase frequency, preferred shopping channels (online, in-store, mobile), and average order value. This information helps in segmenting your marketing strategies.
• Pain points and goals: Understand the challenges your customers face and what they aim to achieve with your products or services. This helps in addressing their needs more effectively.
• Preferred content types: Determine the types of content your customers engage with the most, such as blogs, videos, social media posts, or emails. This helps in creating relevant content that resonates with them.

Map out all potential touchpoints

The next step involves mapping out all potential interactions between your ecommerce business and customers. This ensures no customer interaction is overlooked and helps in creating a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

At this stage, you don’t have to attribute touchpoints to specific stages of the customer journey, just create an exhaustive list of them. For example:

• Website visits: Homepage, product pages, blog articles, landing pages
• Social media: Posts, ads, direct messages, comments
• Email: Newsletters, promotional emails, order confirmations
• Online ads: Banner ads, PPC campaigns, retargeting ads
• Search engine results
• Word-of-mouth referrals
• In-store visits: Physical store interactions, product displays, and in-store promotions
• Customer service: Phone calls, in-person consultations, events, or trade shows
• Live chat: Real-time support on your website
• Email support: Customer inquiries and responses
• Call Centers: Phone support interactions
• Shipping and delivery updates, tracking information
• User-generated content: Customer reviews, photos, and testimonials shared online

Gather customer data

Collect data from various sources to understand customer behavior and gain insights into how customers interact with your brand, helping to tailor the journey to meet their needs.

There are lots of ways in which you can obtain customer data:

1. Talk to your customers (if you already have some)

• Seek information from customer success managers. They can provide direct feedback from ongoing customer interactions.
• Send surveys to customers after purchase to gather insights on their experience, preferences, and satisfaction.

2. Launch an on-site survey for website visitors

• Implement pop-up surveys or feedback forms on your website to capture real-time visitor opinions and preferences. Ask questions about their experience, what they’re looking for, and any obstacles they encounter.

3. Use heatmap tools

• Visualize where users click, scroll, and spend the most time on your website.
• Identify hot spots and areas of friction to understand user behavior and improve site navigation and layout.

1. Tap into analytics 

• Web analytics tools like Google Analytics provide data on page views, session duration, bounce rates, and conversion paths.
• Ecommerce analytics tools track metrics such as cart abandonment rates, product performance, and customer journey paths.
• Behavioral analytics tools analyze user behavior patterns, including repeat visits and purchase history.

Identify customer goals, pain points and actions

This step involves understanding what your customers want to achieve, the challenges they face, and the actions they take at each stage of their journey.

For example:

• Goals: In the awareness stage, your customers’ goal might be to discover new products. In the consideration stage, they aim to evaluate and compare options. At the conversion stage, they want to complete the purchase smoothly.
• Pain points: During the consideration stage, they might struggle with overwhelming choices or unclear product information. At the conversion stage, issues like a complicated checkout process or hidden fees can be major pain points.
• Actions: In the awareness stage, they might engage with social media ads or read blog posts. During the consideration stage, they could be comparing products, reading reviews, and asking questions. At the conversion stage, actions include adding items to their cart, reviewing cart details, and proceeding to checkout.

Visualize the ecommerce customer journey

To effectively visualize the ecommerce customer journey, start by creating the backbone. Identify the key stages your customers go through: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Retention, and Advocacy. Once you have these stages outlined, add depth by incorporating the specific actions customers take, their goals, and the pain points they experience at each stage.

Here’s a fraction of an ecommerce customer journey example that features these:

Stage	Awareness	Consideration	Conversion	Retention	Advocacy
Customer goals	Discover new products	Evaluate options	Complete purchase	Receive ongoing value	Share positive experiences
Customer pain points	Difficulty finding information	Overwhelming choices	Complicated checkout process	Lack of personalized communication	No referral incentives
Customer actions	Engaging with ads, visiting the website	Comparing products, reading reviews	Adding to cart, completing checkout	Reordering, engaging with loyalty programs	Referring friends, sharing on social media
Touchpoints	Social media, ads	Product pages, reviews	Checkout page, payment options	Email newsletter, support	Social media engagement, referral programs

To turn this map into an actionable tool, align each stage with your business goals and activities. Establish KPIs to measure success, use appropriate tools and assign responsible teams to each stage, ensuring clear accountability and focused efforts.

Here’s a complete ecommerce customer journey map example that includes these:

You can use an ecommerce customer journey map template to structure your findings and turn them into an effective sales and marketing tool. 

Top Ideas for Ecommerce Stores to Improve their Customer Journey

Knowing your ecommerce clients’ customer journey is only half the battle. To truly boost your bottom line, you need to actively enhance and optimize this journey. 

Here are a few actionable tips that will help your ecommerce store win customers. 

Create touchpoints at every stage

Establish multiple touchpoints across the customer journey, from social media ads during the Awareness stage to follow-up emails in the Retention stage. This approach supports a multichannel or omnichannel strategy, ensuring customers are consistently in touch with your business and have a seamless experience across all platforms. 

Read more: How to Develop a Successful Ecommerce Strategy: Steps & Examples 

Besides, by controlling these interactions, you can better manage and enhance the customer experience, boosting stage-to-stage conversions.

Personalize your interactions with a customer

Use data to tailor your communications and offers. Personalized emails, product recommendations, and targeted ads significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, making them feel valued and understood.

Make your checkout process seamless

Simplify the checkout process by minimizing steps, offering multiple payment options, and ensuring a mobile-friendly experience. A smooth, hassle-free checkout reduces cart abandonment and boosts conversion rates.

Make sure your website is user-friendly

Design your website for ease of navigation. Use clear categories, intuitive menus, and responsive design to ensure a positive user experience. A user-friendly site keeps customers engaged and increases the likelihood of purchases.

Automate support tasks

Implement chatbots and automated email responses for common customer inquiries. Automation speeds up response times and frees up your support team to handle more complex issues, improving overall customer satisfaction.

Provide self-service options

Offer robust self-service options such as FAQs, knowledge bases, and community forums. Allowing customers to find answers on their own enhances their experience and reduces the burden on your support team.

These are just a few ideas to improve your ecommerce customer journey. Each strategy might vary depending on your specific use case. To explore more tailored solutions, check out our customer journey strategy services.

Afterthought

In ecommerce, timing is everything. The wrong message at the wrong time can drive customers away. By mastering each stage of the customer journey—from awareness to advocacy—you ensure your message hits the mark every time, transforming casual website visitors into loyal advocates. 

From creating impactful touchpoints to personalizing interactions and streamlining the checkout process, each step enhances the customer experience and drives growth. 

At Elogic, we excel in crafting tailored strategies to meet your specific needs and solve your pain points.