In a nutshell: With so many online retailers to choose from, it’s essential to offer optimized e-commerce customer journeys in order to stay relevant and meet the expectations of today’s consumers. This guide covers: What Is the E-commerce Customer Journey?, Optimizing the Customer Journey—Best Practices, Adopt a Customer’s Perspective and Visualize the Journey from A to Z, Ensure Your E-commerce Analytics Are Adequate.
With so many online retailers to choose from, it is essential to offer optimized e-commerce customer journeys in order to remain relevant and meet the expectations of today's consumers.
The public’s perception of your brand is ultimately shaped by the quality of interactions at every touchpoint with your brand, and digital touchpoints have never been more important.
In this article, we explore how to optimize the e-commerce customer journey so you can improve your conversion rate and maintain your brand image.
What is the e-commerce customer journey?
The “e-commerce customer journey” encompasses the stages of a customer’s experience with an online business, from the moment they first learn about its products until they make a purchase.
Technically, there are 5 stages in a customer journey:
- Awareness: The consumer discovers your brand for the first time.
- Acquisition: The prospect is convinced.
- Conversion: The prospect becomes a customer and makes their first purchase.
- Customer Retention: Personalized customer service and exclusive benefits (promotions, etc.).
- Customer Loyalty: The customer makes additional purchases and tells friends and family about them.
The concept of the “customer journey” is very common in marketing, but your customers themselves don’t view their actions on your website as “steps.”
They live it, and it's the details that make all the difference.
The clearer and more seamless the steps are, the better the experience will be for website visitors, which has a positive impact on online sales and customer loyalty.
Some factors that influence the overall e-commerce customer journey:
- How fast the website loads
- Price Transparency
- Placement of CTAs (Call to Action)
- Ease of navigation
- Customer Support Availability
- Mobile Optimization
- Payment Process
Optimizing the Customer Journey – Best Practices
Put yourself in the customer's shoes and visualize the entire journey from start to finish
Optimizing the e-commerce customer journey begins with understanding the customer experience, and mapping the customer journey helps you visualize what happens throughout the journey and clarifies what needs to be improved.
This type of analysis provides valuable insights into how you can better meet your customers' needs.
How do you create a map?
- Start with the home page and make a list of everything that happens there, noting the elements that appear, such as cookie notices, promotional banners, or requests to sign up via email.
- Go to a product page and mimic a customer's actions. How many clicks does it take to get to a product page? Is it difficult to find the product you're looking for?
- Take notes and document the experience step by step. How many clicks did it take to reach each product page? Were pop-ups and other promotions annoying or helpful? How easy was it to find relevant product information? Include screenshots and other visual elements that support your experience. To help you create a visualization, there are online tools such as Lucidchart or Microsoft Visio.
- Repeat the process with different features of the site. Walk through the entire shopping experience, from the first visit to your brand’s website to the attempt to make a purchase. Is the shopping cart easy to manage? Are the prices clear? How many steps are involved between adding an item to the cart and completing the purchase?
Make sure your e-commerce analytics are comprehensive
In an e-commerce context, clickstream data is necessary to understand how users interact with your site.
By analyzing click-through data, you can see where people clicked on your site, which pages they visited, and how much time they spent on each page.
However, while click-stream data provides insight into customer behavior, it doesn't tell the whole story. To get the full picture, you need a visualization tool, such as a:
- Heatmap, which highlights where you get the most engagement.
- Session recording, which provides a video playback of the time the user spends on your site.
- Digital experience intelligence platforms such as FullStory, which provides comprehensive, real-time data on every user interaction.
These tools can help you identify friction points in the customer journey so you can create more intuitive purchasing flows.
Working toward a more human customer journey
A major challenge in e-commerce is to humanize an entirely digital experience.
Here are a few ways to better meet your customers' needs:
- Use a multichannel messaging platform (such as Crisp) that allows you to communicate with your customers in a personalized way.
- Make sure your e-commerce site provides a personalized online shopping experience to maximize conversions (using Front-Commerce, for example).
- Use pop-ups to capture visitors' attention and enhance their customer experience with a tool like Wisepops.
- Maintain consistent availability and support with online chatbots to ensure that your customer service is available even outside of business hours.
- Make the return and refund process as simple as possible.
Improve Your Conversion Rate with an E-commerce-Focused Testing Strategy
A/B Testing
Because they are so simple, A/B tests are particularly useful for optimizing e-commerce customer journeys.
For example, you can use A/B testing to determine effectiveness:
- With a single CTA button
- A design change
- Similarly, something as small as removing the breadcrumb trail from your checkout page.
With the AB Tasty platform, you can conduct A/B tests to easily determine which versions of a page or which elements perform best with users.
Performance tests
Performance testing allows you to determine how smoothly your website or mobile app runs so you can manage response times and avoid frustrating your potential customers.
Data Layer Tests
Data layer tests enhance the monitoring of your tagging plan by testing your data layers, analytics tags, and marketing tags to ensure your data is reliable and accurate 24 hours a day.
Accessibility Testing
Accessibility testing ensures that your e-commerce website or app is accessible to everyone.
Multi-browser/cross-browser testing
Cross-browser testing is a type of functional testing that allows you to verify whether your website works as expected when viewed using different browser-OS combinations, different devices, or accessibility tools.
Mr Suricate Automated Testing for E-commerce Websites and Applications
To improve your conversion rate, it’s essential to ensure that every aspect of your customer journey works seamlessly.
The no-code SaaS solution Mr Suricate a wide range of automated tests to help you manage your acceptance testing and provide your users with the best possible experience.
Take control of your applications and detect bugs in real-time across your websites, mobile apps, and APIs by regularly replicating your user journeys.
Further Reading
To see the solution in action, check out our end-to-end testing.
FAQ
What is the e-commerce customer journey?
It refers to the entire journey a customer goes through, from discovering the website to making a purchase and beyond. Optimizing it means streamlining each step to increase conversion rates.
How can you optimize the e-commerce customer journey?
By adopting an end-to-end customer perspective, relying on thorough analysis, humanizing the experience, and driving improvements through testing.
Why test the e-commerce customer journey?
Because a broken step means a lost sale. Regularly testing the purchase funnel, payments, and key pages directly protects your conversion rate.
How can you improve your conversion rate?
By identifying pain points through analysis, addressing them, and verifying the impact. An e-commerce-focused testing strategy makes this process continuous and reliable.
How does Mr Suricate e-commerce sites?
By automating testing and monitoring of the customer journey, with real-time alerts, for both business teams and major e-commerce clients.
See also: Anthéa Pernaud (interview): How to Improve the Customer Experience.
Take It Further: Automated Testing in Retail and E-Commerce.
