Customer Experience
The 5 Stages of the eCommerce Customer Journey in 2024
Article written by Kate William
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
18 min read
30 May 2024


Customer Experience
Article written by Kate William
Content Marketer at SurveySparrow
18 min read
30 May 2024


In today’s age, eCommerce has become a pivotal part of our lives. It is impossible to think of a time when we couldn’t order something online. From groceries to jewelry, everything is available at the click of a button.
Well, a few buttons. With the increasing number of eCommerce stores, business owners should find ways to streamline the experience of their customers.
This is where mapping the ecommerce customer journey becomes important.
An ecommerce customer journey includes the steps that a customer takes; starting from discovering that there is a need for a product to the final stage, where they buy from you.
Each of the stages they cross is referred to as a customer touchpoint and can be used to create a delightful experience for your prospective customers.
The typical ecommerce customer journey can take days, and it can involve multiple channels.

An ecommerce customer journey map is pivotal for every ecommerce team. Because in order to improve your CX, we need to stop thinking in terms of funnels and start thinking in terms of experiences.
The Funnel is transactional. It serves and reflects our needs but has little to do with what the customer is experiencing and desiring.
Furthermore, it is based on the illusion that the seller still controls the marketing, selling, and sales processes. And that is no longer true. – Jeff Pedowitz, ‘Be Prepared To Step Outside The Funnel For Better CX’
In other words, a customer journey map helps you understand your target audience, what they look for, and how you can provide them with a better experience.
Moreover, by modeling the ecommerce user journey, you can visualize what your customers think and how they feel when they interact with your product. This gives you a deeper understanding of their needs, expectations, and preferences.
For this purpose, it’s good to have an omnichannel CX tool.
SurveySparrow can help you track, analyze, and act to improve customer journeys with our Journey Chart feature. Try our software for free.
| Journey Stage | Key Actions | Content-Type | Engagement Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Understand Brand | Blog & Videos | SEO & Analytics |
| Find Solutions | Infographics | Social Media | |
| Research Issue | Brand Education | Content Quality |
In this stage, the customer learns about you and your product. So you should find where your customers are coming from, how they landed on your website, what landing pages they spend most of their time on, etc. For example, did they find you through search engine results? Or was it through an ad on YouTube?
Additionally, the eCommerce store should track the behavior of the prospective customer. Are they more interested in a particular product? If so, do other prospects with similar characteristics show the same behavior?
Since this is the stage where a customer learns about your business, it is also a great opportunity to find out what their preferences and needs are. Follow up with solutions for these pain points.
Having an effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategy plays a huge importance in this stage. Based on how your customers behave at this stage, you should optimize your marketing and sales strategies.
In the awareness stage, your prospects are experiencing a problem and are looking at solutions for it. They are researching the issue they are having. This is when they land on your website (or any of your other channels). So newsletters, ads, banners, blogs, etc., are touch points at this stage.
| Key Actions | Content-Type | Engagement Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Product Browsing | Webinars & Podcasts | User Engagement |
| Compare Options | Product Comparison | Site Activity Monitor |
| Assess Preferences | Original Reports | Relevant Content |
At this stage, the customer shows real interest in your products or services. They are looking at other options available in the market too. Unfortunately, most businesses lose clients during this stage if they don’t find what they are looking for.
The customers must be engaged at this stage of the ecommerce journey. Otherwise, they will lose interest.
But keeping customers engaged at this stage is a big challenge. They might not look at more than one category of products. Once they start browsing your website, they might feel that it is not up to their liking.
Category filters, store pages, landing pages, etc., are touchpoints in this stage.

| Key Actions | Content-Type | Engagement Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Make a Purchase | Testimonials | Promotions |
| Eliminate Doubts | Trials & Demos | Simple Checkout |
| Engage & Act | Consultation | Retargeting Tools |
The next step after keeping customers engaged is conversion. Thanks to your engagement activities, customers take action resulting in them making a purchase.
Many customers don’t reach the conversion stage at all. Cart abandonment is such a common phenomenon too. To improve the conversion rate, there should be a variety of things you should do.
| Key Actions | Content-Type | Engagement Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Post-Purchase Support | Community Building | Customer Service |
| Maximize ROI | In-app Messages | Loyalty Programs |
| Customer Loyalty | Knowledge Base | Upselling |
Having people buy your products is satisfying. But what’s better is to make them keep coming back again and again. So the onus is on the eCommerce store to keep their existing customers satisfied.
In fact, a sale is the beginning of the customer experience process. The objective should be to maximize your ROI from the customer.
Metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) tell you how much business your customer brings over the course of their association with you. It starts from their first purchase and ends when they stop buying from you. It is one of the most important metrics that eCommerce stores should track.
If your CLV is a small amount and reflects just one or two purchases, then there is something wrong with how you do business.
By increasing customer retention just by 5%, you can boost profits by more than 100%, according to a study by Harvard Business Review. This stat is a telling statement of the importance of having loyal customers. Ultimately, loyal customers are the ones who will become advocates and promoters for your brand.

| Key Actions | Content-Type | Engagement Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Promote Brand | Positive Reviews | Relationship Building |
| Share Experience | Referral Campaigns | Multi-channel Engage |
| Strengthen Bonds | Testimonials | Data Outreach |
In this stage, you have customers who are die-hard fans of your brand. These are the ones who are ready to share your products with their friends and family. Moreover, they will be more than happy to write testimonials about you.
Fun fact: 88% of people trust online recommendations as much as personal recommendations.
One of the most basic steps while mapping the online customer journey is to define your buyer personas. Below are the questions you must ask for it:
The average business has anywhere from three to seven personas. After you create the required personas, design a customer journey map eCommerce for each persona.
While building buyer personas, you must also clearly write down your goals behind the customer journey mapping activity. By doing this exercise, you will be able to address various challenges that you will face in your eCommerce store since your understanding of customers will grow manifold.
Make a list of every way in which your customer will be interacting with your eCommerce brand. The touchpoints could be from different channels- social media ads, retargeting emails, customer support agent interaction, blog posts, video ads, etc.
Write down the list of channels where your customers interact with your brand. Find out the different pain points that your customers face along their journey toward becoming your customer.
Track how your customers feel when they interact with you at each touchpoint. The reason behind considering your customer’s emotional state is to understand them on a more humane level so that the interaction experience could be designed keeping this in mind. Creating an empathy map puts you in a position where you can find moments of despair and frustration when interacting with your brand and make changes accordingly.
The customer journey map should reflect how real users interact with your product. Make sure that the journey resembles real-use cases with the help of usability testing sessions and product analytic tools. The user journey eCommerce should be updated at regular intervals, just like any other user research.
Creating an eCommerce customer journey map gives you a full overview of the experience that you offer to your customers. By finding areas where customers find issues, you can provide a better experience. It will also increase your conversion rates.
Moreover, if you keep refining the customer journey map at regular intervals, you will be able to improve their experience at every interaction touchpoint.
If you want to gather insights to collect customer data to map the customer journey, or if you are looking to improve your customer experience, get in touch with us.
The awareness stage is the first step in the eCommerce customer journey. It is the stage where the customer discovers that they have pain points and are looking for a solution for it.
eCommerce has three main types of customers:
It tells the story of a customer’s journey across every touchpoint in a visual manner. The main objective behind creating a customer journey model is to improve the customer experience.
Offering a good experience for your customers while interacting with your brand should be the top priority of all eCommerce stores. One of the easiest ways to create a good customer journey is to listen to your customers at every choice possible.
Increasing traffic and conversions are two areas that every eCommerce store wants to keep improving. So here are a few strategies for eCommerce stores to increase online sales:
By mapping the customer journeys for your eCommerce store, you will find several ideas to improve their shopping experience. As a result, you will significantly increase your conversion rates since the experience your store visitors get will be personalized to their buyer personas.

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