Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Aaron Agius

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

person creating a customer journey map

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

  • What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

  • Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

  • Customer Journey Design
  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

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Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

  • Buyer's Journey Template
  • Future State Template
  • Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

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The Online Shopper Journey Explained: How to Create a Seamless Customer Experience

Woopra

Customer experience is the key to eCommerce success. It is how you make your customers feel when they interact with your online store, products, and service.

In this article, we will explain what customer experience is, why it matters, and how you can enhance the online shopper journey.

What Is the eCommerce Customer Journey?

The eCommerce customer journey is a series of steps a potential customer takes before eventually purchasing. It starts with becoming aware of the product or service, considering whether it meets their needs, and then buying it.

But the journey doesn't end there. The eCommerce customer journey also includes post-purchase engagement and loyalty, which can lead to repeat purchases and referrals.

So why is the eCommerce customer journey important? Because it helps you understand your customers better, optimize your marketing strategies, and deliver a better customer experience.

By mapping out the eCommerce customer journey, you can identify the touch points where customers interact with your brand, the pain points where they face challenges or frustrations, and the opportunities where you can delight them and encourage them to take action.

The eCommerce customer journey is not linear or uniform. It can vary depending on the product, the customer, and the channel. However, there are some common stages that most customers go through, such as awareness, consideration, decision, and retention.

In this article, we will explain each stage of the eCommerce customer journey and how you can improve yours to increase conversions and retention.

Stages of The eCommerce Customer Journey

To understand and optimize your eCommerce customer journey, you need to know the different stages that customers go through before and after buying from you. In this section, we will explain the five main stages of the eCommerce customer journey and how to improve each one.

This is when potential customers discover your brand and products through various channels, such as social media, search engines, blogs, or word-of-mouth. They are looking for solutions to their problems or needs, and they become aware of your offerings.

At this stage, your goal is to capture their attention and interest and educate them about your value proposition. You can do this by creating engaging content, running targeted ads, optimizing your SEO, and leveraging social proof.

Consideration

This is when potential customers evaluate your products and compare them with other options. They are looking for more information, such as features, benefits, reviews, testimonials, or demos.

They are also considering factors such as price, delivery, warranty, or customer service. At this stage, your goal is to persuade them that your products are the best solution for their needs and that they can trust you as a reliable seller.

You can do this by providing clear and compelling product pages, offering free trials or samples, showcasing customer success stories, and providing live chat or phone support.

This is when potential customers are ready to buy from you. They have narrowed down their choices and decided that your products are the ones they want. They are looking for a smooth and easy checkout process, a secure payment method, and a confirmation of their order.

At this stage, your goal is to remove any friction or hesitation that might prevent them from completing their purchase. You can do this by offering multiple payment options, displaying trust badges, providing free shipping or discounts, and sending order confirmation emails.

This is when existing customers continue to buy from you. They have had a positive experience with your products and service, and they are loyal to your brand. They are looking for more value, such as new products, recommendations, rewards, or referrals.

At this stage, your goal is to increase customer lifetime value and advocacy. You can do this by sending personalized emails, offering loyalty programs or coupons, requesting feedback or reviews, and encouraging referrals or social sharing.

This is when customers become brand advocates and actively recommend your products or services to others. This is the most powerful form of marketing, as it’s based on word-of-mouth and referral traffic.

At this stage, your goal is to amplify customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can do this by rewarding customers for their advocacy, featuring them on your website or social media channels, creating user-generated content campaigns, and asking them to join your online community.

How To Create An Online Shopper Journey Map

An online shopper journey map is a visual representation of how customers interact with your eCommerce store, from the moment they become aware of your brand to the moment they make a purchase and beyond.

It helps you understand their needs, expectations, and emotions at each stage of the journey, and identify the opportunities and challenges they face along the way.

Creating an online shopper journey map can help you improve your customer experience, increase conversions, and build loyalty. Here are the steps to create one:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Before you can map your customer journey, you need to know who your customers are. You can use buyer personas to segment your target audience based on their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and goals.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers that help you understand their pain points, motivations, and preferences. You can create buyer personas by conducting market research, surveys, interviews, or using analytics tools.

2. Define The Stages Of The Journey

Next, you need to define the stages of the customer journey that your personas go through when they shop online. These stages may vary depending on your business model, product type, and industry.

But, as we’ve already discussed, you need to map out how you’ll work with customers across the five stages of the customer journey.

3. Outline the Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any point of interaction between the customer and your brand, such as a website visit, an email, a social media post, or a phone call.

You need to outline all the touchpoints that occur at each stage of the journey and how they influence the customer's behavior and perception.

You can use analytics tools, customer feedback, or user testing to identify the touchpoints and measure their effectiveness.

4. Gather Customer Insights

To create a realistic and accurate customer journey map, you need to gather insights from your customers' perspectives. You need to understand what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at each touchpoint and stage of the journey.

You can use qualitative and quantitative methods to collect customer insights, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, reviews, ratings, comments, or metrics.

5. Map the Journey

You need to map the customer journey using a visual tool or template that shows the stages of the journey, the touchpoints at each stage, and the customer insights for each touchpoint.

You can use different colors, icons, shapes, or graphs to illustrate the customer journey map and make it easy to understand. You can also add opportunities or pain points that you discover along the way and figure out how you can address them.

6. Add Customer Emotions and Actions

To make your customer journey map more comprehensive and human-centered, you need to add customer emotions and actions at each touchpoint and stage of the journey. Customer emotions are how customers feel about their interactions with your brand, such as happy, frustrated, satisfied, or disappointed.

Customer actions are what customers do as a result of their emotions or needs, such as browsing your website, adding items to their cart, abandoning their cart, or contacting support.

You can use emoticons, words, or scales to indicate customer emotions and actions on your map.

7. Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

One of the main purposes of creating a customer journey map is to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement along the way. Pain points are any issues or challenges that customers face that prevent them from having a positive experience or achieving their goals.

Opportunities are any areas where you can enhance the customer experience or provide more value to customers. You can use symbols, colors, or labels to mark pain points and opportunities on your map.

8. Validate and Iterate

Once you have created your customer journey map, you need to validate it with real data and feedback from your customers. You can use various methods, such as surveys, interviews, or analytics tools, to test your assumptions and verify your findings.

You may discover new insights or gaps in your map that require you to revise or update it. You should also iterate your map regularly to reflect any changes in your business, market, or customer behavior.

9. Use the Journey Map to Drive Improvements

Creating a customer journey map is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end: improving the customer experience and achieving your business goals.

Therefore, you need to use the journey map to drive improvements and actions that will enhance the customer journey and deliver more value to your customers.

To use the journey map effectively, you need to:

Communicate it: Share your journey map with your team, stakeholders, and partners. Explain the purpose, process, and findings of your journey mapping project. Highlight the pain points and opportunities you identified and how they affect the customer experience and your business outcomes. Use storytelling techniques and visual aids to make your journey map engaging and memorable.

Prioritize it: Based on your journey map, prioritize the areas that need improvement or optimization. Consider the impact, feasibility, and urgency of each improvement opportunity. Use a matrix or a scoring system to rank them and decide which ones to focus on first.

Implement it: Based on your priorities, create an action plan that outlines the steps, resources, and timelines for implementing the improvements. Assign roles and responsibilities to your team members and partners. Track and measure the progress and results of your actions using relevant metrics and indicators.

Update it: As you implement your improvements, monitor and evaluate their effects on the customer journey and experience. Collect feedback from your customers and analyze their behavior and satisfaction. Update your journey map accordingly to reflect any changes or new insights. Repeat the process as needed to keep your journey map current and relevant.

Why Is the Customer Journey Necessary For eCommerce Platforms?

The customer journey is necessary for eCommerce platforms because it helps them understand and improve the customer experience, which is crucial for their success and growth.

The customer experience is the sum of all the interactions and emotions that customers have with a brand, from the first contact to the post-purchase stage. It affects customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, advocacy, and ultimately, revenue.

According to a study by PwC, 73% of consumers say that customer experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions, and 43% would pay more for greater convenience.

Moreover, 65% of consumers say that a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising.

By mapping the customer journey, eCommerce platforms can gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s needs, expectations, and pain points at each stage of the journey.

They can also identify the opportunities and challenges they face along the way, and how they can address them.

By using the customer journey map to drive improvements, eCommerce platforms can enhance the customer experience and deliver more value to their customers.

They can also align their operations and messaging with customer expectations, leading to more efficient and effective communication and marketing.

How Can You Enhance Your Customer's Experience?

Enhancing your customer's experience is not only beneficial for your customers but also for your eCommerce business. A positive customer experience can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, advocacy, and revenue.

According to a study by Adobe , companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% year-over-year growth, a 10% increase in average order value, and a 25% increase in close rates.

So how can you enhance your customer's experience and achieve these results? Here are some tips and best practices to follow:

1. Always Ask For Their Feedback

One of the best ways to improve your customer's experience is to ask them for their feedback.

Feedback can help you understand what your customers like and dislike about your eCommerce store, products, and service. It can also help you identify their needs, expectations, and pain points.

You can use various methods to collect feedback from your customers, such as surveys, reviews, ratings, comments, or social media. You can also use tools like GetFeedback to create and manage feedback campaigns across multiple channels.

2. Optimize for Search Engines

Another way to enhance your customer's experience is to optimize your eCommerce store for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you rank higher on search results pages and drive more organic traffic to your store.

SEO can also improve your site's usability, speed, and relevance, which can positively impact your customer's experience.

You can use various techniques to optimize your eCommerce store for SEO, such as conducting keyword research, creating quality content, optimizing your site structure and navigation, using meta tags and schema markup, improving your site speed and mobile-friendliness, and building backlinks.

3. Have Good Customer Support

Having good customer support is essential for enhancing your customer's experience. Customer support is how you help your customers with their questions, issues, or complaints. Customer support can influence your customer's satisfaction, trust, and loyalty.

You can provide good customer support by offering multiple channels of communication, such as phone, email, chat, or social media. You can also use tools like ProProfs Desk to manage your customer support tickets and queries efficiently and effectively.

4. Personalization Is Necessary

Personalization is another way to enhance your customer's experience. Personalization is how you tailor your eCommerce store, products, and marketing to suit your customer's preferences, behavior, and needs.

Personalization can increase your customer's engagement, relevance, and conversion rates .

You can use various methods to personalize your eCommerce store, such as using customer data and analytics, segmenting your customers into groups or personas, creating personalized recommendations or offers, sending personalized emails or messages, or using dynamic content or landing pages.

5. Analyze Customer Behavior

Analyzing customer behavior is also important for enhancing your customer's experience.

Customer behavior is how your customers interact with your eCommerce store, such as what pages they visit, what products they view or buy, what actions they take, or what feedback they leave.

Analyzing customer behavior can help you understand your customer’s needs, motivations, and pain points. It can also help you identify the opportunities and challenges in your customer journey and optimize your eCommerce store accordingly. You can use various tools to analyze customer behavior, but naturally, we think you should give Woopra a try .

The Bottom Line

To conclude, enhancing your customer’s experience is vital for your eCommerce success.

By following the tips and best practices mentioned above, you can create a positive and memorable customer experience that will increase your customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, advocacy, and revenue. Start improving your customer’s experience today and see the difference it makes.

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How to Make Sense of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

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No one can deny how big the ecommerce market is. Global ecommerce sales are projected to nearly double to $6.5 trillion by 2023. Its share of total retail sales is also growing, particularly in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

So we know the sector is massive, but how complicated is it? Surely it is just a simple matter of finding the product you want, buying it, then waiting for delivery. Or is there far more to the ecommerce customer journey? There are multiple factors, from lead times to customer service, that makes an ecommerce business a good ecommerce business (or not). 

Modern business, especially ecommerce , is about identifying and utilizing the best tools available. And that covers everything from live video conference software to good CRM management systems. 

Smaller businesses need to find such tools without breaking the bank. Fortunately, they can choose from the best free business apps that will provide great service without denting the budget. Having the ability to be agile and to adapt to changes can be a major positive for your business. 

If you look at a successful online retailer such as Larq , you will see a well-constructed site that is easy to navigate and that also offers links to their various social media platforms. This is a good example of how an ecommerce site should look. It shows they have looked at the customer journey and optimized their site to make it a positive one. 

You need to know each stage of that journey, how those stages affect customer experiences and their relationship with you, and how you can improve the journey at every level and customer touchpoint . Let’s look at how the customer journey unfolds and what factors of customer journey mapping that are important for you to understand.

What is the Ecommerce Customer Journey?

That quote about life from Ralph Waldo Emerson can also be applied to ecommerce businesses. While it is easy to think about the destination—that purchase arriving in the customer’s hands—it is also very much about the journey and what happens en route to that final destination. Just as with life’s journey, every stage of the ecommerce journey has its own features and qualities. 

Our customers no longer buy just a product, they buy the whole experience of being a customer, they buy your brand qualities, your mission and values, and more. They buy into the ease of your processes, the information you provide, the convenience, the quality of your aftersales (and presales if needed) customer service. In short, they look at the whole package you offer.

We all do process mapping for our businesses as a matter of course, so we should be doing the same for the customer experience. You need to understand every aspect of how your business operates, from dealing with logistics to ensuring your customers are happy. 

And do not be afraid to use shortcuts. The very reason tools such as templates are offered is to make it easier for you to conduct business. They can save you time and money and it can be easy to find one that suits you. 

It is not only the price of something that matters to them, it is everything that surrounds it, including how they access your site or app (and how easy it is to use), how you communicate with them across different channels, possibly even using companies like Slack , and how quickly you respond to their inquiries. In short, it is about providing an ecommerce customer journey map that meets all of their needs. 

Focus not only on your customers’ journeys, but also on their relationship with you; that’s important whether you are a small business or a large international one. Investing in customer relationship management (CRM) software is highly advised, especially when you have a multichannel or omnichannel business. 

There are also other aspects to consider. Many people now ask ‘ what is affiliate marketing ’, as offered by MaxBounty, and what is its place in online retail? If you use a strategy such as affiliate marketing, then you need to make sure that a customer’s journey is consistent across all the options open to them. Whether they find you via your own channels or through an affiliate.  

5 Stages of the Ecommerce Customer Journey

So we recognize that the customer journey is far more than a simple buying process. We also recognize that we need to know how to develop a successful ecommerce fulfillment strategy that helps us win and retain customers. Knowing the main stages of that journey is essential to both mapping it and ensuring that it is as optimized as possible. 

And when a business operates across many channels (omnichannel or multichannel ), you need to recognize that their journey may differ greatly depending on which channel they are using. 

1. Awareness.

Every journey has a starting point, and in the ecommerce business, that starting point is awareness. This is the stage where the customer discovers your product/service and your brand. This is also where you discover how they found you. Did they find you via a search engine (thus validating your SEO strategy)? Did they see an ad on social media or in a more traditional medium? 

You can not only see where they came from but also what behaviors they are showing once they have ‘arrived’. Do they look at particular landing pages that give you an idea of what products they are interested in? You could also describe this as the first learning stage; the customer is learning about your business and you are learning their preferences and needs. 

2. Consideration. 

In this stage, the customer begins to show real interest in particular products or services and move beyond general browsing. For example, with a cosmetics company such as Bliss World , they may start looking at the vegan skincare range, letting you see that this is their specific interest product-wise. 

From your organization’s perspective, this stage of behavior allows you to analyze what works and what doesn’t. Those analytics can help you reduce bounce rates and encourage further investigation by the customer. 

3. Conversion. 

One of the magic words in ecommerce, but this stage is not always a guaranteed sale. In some cases, this stage can include those customers who have added a product to their cart (or to their wishlist) but have not yet proceeded to actually buying it. In most cases, though, we do consider this to be the stage at which a prospective customer becomes an actual customer who adds to your conversion rate. 

It is at this stage that you as a business have to begin delivering on any promises you may have made to get the customer to this point. Part of that delivery is making sure all your processes, such as marketing, sales, customer service, etc., are aligned and are delivering the same message and quality of service. 

4. Retention. 

Another of those magic words. Having a customer make a single purchase is satisfying, but having them return again and again to buy is even more satisfying. This means they are very happy with most or all aspects of their journey and experience to date. From this point they begin to exhibit brand loyalty and may always look at your site before others. 

The thing for businesses to be aware of at this stage is that providing an excellent experience once is fairly easy, but providing it time and time again is where the challenge lies. 

5. Advocacy. 

This stage is the Holy Grail of the customer journey but do not expect to achieve it with every customer. Most companies fall short at stage four, but those who do manage to retain customers are then hoping that those people become advocates and brand ambassadors with a high lifetime value. At this stage, your best customers are not only buying but interacting at a high level. 

They will interact with you across most if not all of your touchpoints, such as your homepage, any blogs, social media, etc. More importantly (from your marketing perspective), they will be sharing information that you post on their own platforms and will actively advocate and talk about your products/services. That can also include recommending you to people and writing reviews. 

Building an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map

An ecommerce 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. 

That customer journey may consist of all the stages we previously listed or they may only cover some of them, if customers do not move to later stages. What you need to focus on is that a customer journey map will show you all the possible permutations of what the customer experiences, whether only one or two stages or all five.

How Do You Build Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps?

Being able to map the customer journey offers many benefits, but if you have never undertaken this exercise before, where do you start? What things do you need to consider before starting? 

1. Perspective.

The first important thing to note is that you need your map to be from the customer’s perspective. So, detach yourself from your professional role and start the process as if you were an everyday customer. This can also help you understand the overall customer persona. 

To do so, pick a product or service your company offers. Use various terms on search engines to see what results come up. Read any associated material including reviews, articles, and blogs. Then visit your actual site to view the product there. Take notes on how the various customer touchpoints felt and how the experience of visiting the site unfolded. 

2. Research. 

Put together a focus group that consists of your main demographic targets. Ideally, they will not know what company or brand has formed this group. Pick one of your products or services and ask the focus group to find and buy that item online. Observe and record how they find the item, what paths they take, and what outcomes unfold. 

Once the focus group has finished their exercise, take the results and compare them with your experience from part one. By analyzing the two exercises, you can see if you and your customers think in the same way, and will also have a wider overview of touchpoints and interactions.  

3. Understanding.

You now have a better overview of how customers interact with your business and how the various touchpoints perform. You now need to understand what those various actions mean in terms of engagement strategy. Did any touchpoint perform particularly badly? By analyzing the information you have collected, you can see what action you need to take next. 

Your aim is to have your ecommerce site performing at an optimum level at every touchpoint you (and your customers) have identified. Those touchpoints can range from your own site to your social media platforms to search engine rankings. They can also include independent touchpoints such as review sites. 

4. Goals and pain.

You now have some of the foundations of your customer journey map in place. But it is more than just identifying the touchpoints and engagements you have observed. You also need to understand the goals of the customer and the pain points they experience. It can help greatly if you list some of the insights gained from your observation and data collection:

Goals . What is the customer’s ultimate goal(s)? What is it they want to achieve?

Emotional response . What parts of the process make the customer happy? Or what elements make them unhappy or frustrated? 

Pain points . What things cause issues for the customer and would they like to see improved? 

5. Visualization.

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Image source  

You should now have enough (likely a lot) of information that tells you what the customer experiences. The problem is that this information is not easy to digest, so you want to simplify it and create a visual that is easy to look at and understand. How you format it will depend very much on your own specific business model. 

You may decide to create more than one visual, especially when you are a larger company and may have different teams working on different areas. For example, if you have a dedicated social media team, you may decide to create a journey map that particularly pertains to social media touchpoints, pain points, experiences, etc. 

Why is the Customer Journey Important?

Do you really need to make a customer journey map? What benefits does it bring you? Knowing why it is important is as crucial as understanding the whole process itself. There are many reasons why it is not only important, but should be an integral part of your ecommerce business. 

Efficiency . It can help you streamline the customer experience and journey by identifying if there are too many steps or touchpoints between the customer starting their journey and ending it. 

Effectiveness . Does the required journey make sense to your customers? Acknowledging that we all do things differently, from how we search to how we navigate a site, creating a process that has a general effectiveness for most is a major benefit of a customer journey map. 

Understanding . Knowing and understanding your customers, how they think, what they need, what they like and don’t like, is another crucial factor in determining how to create the best possible customer journey. In fact, this is an area where many organizations fail as they focus more on creating the perfect journey for them, rather than their customers. 

Setting goals . A good customer journey map can help you identify and set better and more realistic goals. The combination of a human perspective and the hard data you have collected ensures you are more in touch with what makes your business thrive and grow. It also helps you monitor and tweak in real time as you move forward. 

Planning . Every business has one eye on the future; new products and services, expansion, etc. Having an accurate customer journey map, and understanding it, means that you can more accurately focus on those future events. 

Reducing pain . Pain points are the bane of any online stores and can lose you customers if not identified and remedied. You may be surprised by how many pain points exist once you have completed your journey map. Once you have identified them, you can take action to remove them or to reduce their effects. 

How Ecommerce Stores Can Improve Their Customer Journey

For companies looking closely at their customers’ journeys for the first time, it can sometimes be daunting when flaws and gaps are identified that are having a very real effect on your business. Mapping the customer journey is one thing, but knowing how you can act on the data you have identified and improving the customer journey and experience is another. 

1. Create touchpoints at every stage.

Anywhere a customer interacts with your brand is a touchpoint. Seeing an ad, visiting your site, looking at independent reviews, contacting your business to find store locations, and finally making a purchase. All of these are touchpoints. Going back to the five stages of the customer journey we discussed earlier, you need to have touchpoints for each stage. 

Each touchpoint serves a purpose and plays its part in optimizing the overall customer journey. So each touchpoint you create has to fulfil its specific purpose (ad attracting interest, checkout process quick and uncomplicated, etc.) Ensuring you have multiple touchpoints that fit their respective stages and work properly is essential. 

2. Optimize your website for every device.

It is worth remembering that around half of all internet traffic originates from mobile devices . So if your website performs poorly when accessed from a mobile device, you are in effect alienating half your potential customer base. Optimization is key to offering a good experience to all. 

It can help to look at great websites that are well optimized, such as Skullcandy , so you can see what is needed. The screenshot below shows how well you can view their products from a mobile device, making online shopping easier for customers. 

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And there are a few factors to take into consideration when optimizing your site:

Test your site . Knowing your site works well on mobile devices is absolutely crucial. You can do this manually at first simply by accessing your site via several different devices. Look especially at loading times and how the site looks on a small screen. For more in-depth testing, use Google’s free testing tool . 

Web host . Make sure your web host offers the speed and resources required to make your site fast and responsive. A slow and unresponsive home page and website will put customers off. You also want a host that guarantees the minimum of downtime. 

Apps . Consider launching an app to complement your website. They are not as expensive as you think and they can help boost both sales and engagement . 

3. Use proactive customer support.

Don’t wait for problems to happen and for customers to contact you. Anticipate the problems or questions most likely to occur and provide answers and solutions that will keep your customers happy. Offering proactive customer support has a number of benefits. 

Better customer retention rates. Being proactive means you’re more likely to have happy, loyal customers.

Less calls to your support team. By solving problems proactively, customers can see the solutions themselves and thus will make less calls to you, freeing up your team to deal with more complicated queries and also reducing waiting times. 

More first time customers. People talk about the good service they receive and that includes proactive support. When satisfied customers share their experiences, that can lead to new first-time customers. 

Increased productivity. Proactivity means better communication. And that means your team has more time to listen to and help customers who call and to collect more information and data.

Communication. You are probably already using video and messaging collaboration tools for sales teams , so why not ensure you also have great tools to communicate with customers. Chatbots and AI are great ways of proactively helping your customers find information. 

4. Personalization is key.

It is neither a secret nor a surprise that people like a personal touch, and that is true whether in ‘real life’ or in online shopping and ecommerce marketing. That means going beyond using their name (which you can do with website automation or in marketing emails) and also recognizing their particular interests and buying habits. 

Using tactics such as dynamic content marketing, which can customize content according to buying preferences, location, age, gender, etc., means you are offering a personalized approach that can lead to increased sales and better customer retention. Automation and analytics can be the two drivers when it comes to personalizing the customer journey, so use them wisely. 

Smaller businesses may feel they could be overwhelmed by these demands, but with so much technology and automation available on a budget, it is not that difficult to do. There are many mobile apps for small business owners that can help with factors such as communications and social media posting, so see what tools can both help you and save money that may be spent elsewhere. 

5. Gather data as much as possible and be flexible.

Data is not a one off exercise. Collect as much data as possible in the early stages, but keep collecting it always. Collect data not only on customer behavior and the customer lifecycle, but also general info via surveys, polls, etc. on your social media platforms and via email. The data you collect is a hugely important resource and offers you several benefits and potential uses.

And it is, of course, not just about collecting data, but about analyzing it and interpreting it efficiently. Consider using one of the many tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you with this. Identify what metrics, such as KPIs, matter most to you. A good KPI helps show your business is healthy. 

Data is not just a collection of information, it offers tangible benefits that can help your business grow by developing strategies for the future . 

Understand the market . Collecting and analyzing consumer data helps you understand how your ideal customers behave online. It helps define and segment particular demographics, understand better what customers want, and see ways to improve the overall experience throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Expand your database . The more information you have on customers, the bigger, and more efficient, your database is. And with detailed data, you can segment your customers (and potential customers) into groups that make more personalized strategies, such as dynamic content marketing, easier to achieve. 

A larger database allows you to use a variety of strategies. For example, instant messaging can be a great way to boost your ecommerce sales.  

Better marketing . By constantly collecting data, you get better insights into which of your marketing strategies and campaigns have worked well. The more data you have, the easier it is to identify which sorts of campaigns are best, and what platforms reach more of your ideal customer base and generate more leads. 

Those campaigns could be via social media or you could identify what sort of email campaigns best drive sales.  

Customer relationship management is perhaps one of the most important factors for ecommerce businesses to consider and it is worth investing in good CRM software to help with this. You may understand the customer journey, but managing that journey on an ongoing basis is a big task. 

Aim to be consistent and to ensure you provide the same positive customer experience throughout every journey. Your online store has to be as accessible and helpful as any physical store would be. And that applies to every channel, platform, and touchpoint where your customers interact with you. 

Ecommerce businesses range from massive multinational corporations to small solo entrepreneurs. Customers range from occasional purchasers of low value items to regular buyers of high value goods. No matter who you are or who they are, you should be aiming for parity so that every journey and experience is positive.

Pohan Lin avatar

Pohan Lin is the Senior Global Web Marketing Manager at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP and video conferencing solutions providers. He has over 18 years variety experience in web marketing, online SaaS business and ecommerce growth. Pohan has a passion for innovation and communicating the impact that technology has in marketing.

Create an e-commerce customer journey map with a free tool

Customer journey mapping in e-commerce is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your online business. It starts when they first become aware of your products, to completing a purchase. It can extend to after-purchase care.

MacBook standing on a desk. On the screen a yellow couch is visible.

Buying and selling products on the internet is as popular as ever. There are many small and medium sized businesses entering online shopping space thanks to popular e-commerce sites like Shopify or BigCommerce. If they want to build up their market share and not lose out, they need to ensure smooth customer experience.

It all boils down to one thing—

Mapping e-commerce customer journey.

It lets you understand customer's complex interactions with your brand and meet their needs.

This article covers the following topics:

  • Why journey mapping for our e-commerce is important?
  • Creating an e-commerce journey map with examples
  • Online shopping challenges and how to solve them
  • Bonus: e-commerce journey template

Why is journey mapping in e-commerce important?

Designing a customer journey map in e-commerce is key to:

  • Understand customer interactions across different touchpoints (ads, newsletter, T&Cs, customer support, and many more)
  • Identify customer's pain points
  • Improve satisfaction scores and increase the number of returnig customers
  • Improve existing operations based on concrete data
  • Identify potential new target groups
  • Strategize how to reach customers in the future

Sounds good?

Let's see where to start!

How to create an e-commerce customer journey map?

At Smaply, we know the ropes of making customer journey map . So even if you have never done this before, we'll guide you through the process. You can even use Smaply's free customer journey mapping software with our tips and tricks to speed the process up.

1. Empathize with customer personas

There is no customer journey map without a customer. So you have to think about who our customer is—or should be to understand their needs and expectations.

The first step is to create a persona that represents this target group in a customer-centric way. Defining a persona in e-commerce can help you answer some important questions:

  • What does the user need/want?
  • What channels and devices does the persona use in order to research products?
  • How price-sensitive is the user?
  • What are their concrete expectations about their online shopping experience?
  • What products does the persona value?

By answering these questions, you can get a better understanding of your target group. The questions above are just examples. You could also include country specific questions or cultural differences. Just think about which information might be helpful for their e-commerce journey.

Check out the example profile of a persona in a customer journey map for an online shop.

Illustration of the persona Carl, an actor who enjoys sustainable shopping end fashion.

Keep in mind that when you run an online shop, you should also examine potential customers or leads.

2. Define the scope of the e-commerce journey map

When creating a journey map, you can choose between various scales and scopes.

When you start out, we recommend that you use a high-level journey map to visualize the whole experience the user has with your brand. From finding to your e-commerce site, searching for the right product, the check-out process, and up until the product delivery.

Then, you can create a more detailed map to dive deeper into a specific step. For example, you might want to focus on the product search on your website through different category pages or the check-out funnel.

Many e-commerce shops lose customers during the check-out process. It might be useful to investigate this step. Is the process intuitive? Or is it confusing for customers?

3. Analyze experiences, step by step, stage by stage

Now, we have to map down the user’s journey.

Every e-commerce journey map consists of several stages and steps:

Stages of e-commerce: Awareness > Consideration > Decision > Delivery and Use > Return

Once we’ve defined the stages, think about the different steps and touchpoints customers experience when they are interacting with your online shop. The level of detail of each step depends on the overall scale of the map that we’ve defined above. Ask yourself:

  • What are the steps within each stage?
  • What are the customers’ goals and pain points at each step of the journey?
  • What are your own business goals for each step?
  • Where do your current customers drop out of the journey, leave our website?
  • Do they get the right information at the right time?

Describe your customer's journey step by step to empathize with him.

There's one important thing to keep in mind at this point—

The customer journey starts before users get to our website. It starts with a need, a desire for a more or less specific product. Also, the customer's e-commerce journey does't end at the checkout. Nor when users hold the product in their hands.

Customers experience and interact with your brand after completing the online purchase. For example, when contacting support, returning to your shop, or recommending the brand to their social network.

5. Visualizing processes

This is an often neglected step in mapping e-commerce journeys.

You can also focus on the backstage activities happening during the journey. What needs to happen behind the scene, outside of the customers’ view to deliver a smooth experience? Close to a service blueprint, visualizing different levels of processes helps webiste owners better understand who’s involved at what step of an experience and who is responsible for their optimization.

In the below map you can see a strong focus on enabling processes could look like.

Illustration of the backstage processes happening in an ecommerce business.

For comprehensive and complex journey maps with advanced lane and content types like those above, use a digital customer journey mapping software .

Examples of journey maps in e-commerce

This simple e-commerce journey map illustrates the steps of two different personas and compares their experience. It visualizes:

  • Channels they use
  • Their emotions
  • Involvement (dramatic arc)
  • Ideas for improvement
  • Backstage lane that provides a rough idea of  the processes that are invisible to the customer

online shopping journey map

This example of online shopping experience map shows a strong focus on backstage processes. It clearly differentiates between processes that are visible to the customers, and processes that aren’t. Hence, it gets very close to a service blueprint.

online shopping journey map

What are the challenges of mapping journeys in e-commerce?

Getting lost in all the data.

In e-commerce, it is common to collect loads of data about users, their preferences, purchase history, and needs. It can be extremely useful and help get a better and more holistic understanding of your customers. However, using all this data too early in the process of mapping e-commerce journeys can prevent you from understanding of the big picture.

Quantitative data (e.g., from Google Analytics) is a good resource for sure, but remember to look at qualitative data, too. For example, try to interview some of your customers after the purchase or send them a customer survey to get some qualitative insights.

The good thing about qualitative data is that it helps us find the biggest pain points easily. If there’s a hole in the street and three pedestrians point to it, we don’t need another 10 folks to confirm this, right?

Also, quantitative data will never give you an answer to the “why”:

  • Why did users visit your page?
  • Why did they buy from your site, and not another?
  • Why did they abandon the cart?

Some more questions that could be interesting to dive into are:

  • How did they research the product in the first place?
  • What online and offline channels did they use?
  • How do they evaluate the experience on our website?
  • How do our users think your page could be improved?

Consider context and think cross-channel

Many different channels influence the e-commerce journey: website, shopping app, review portals and word of mouth…

Even though a big part of a service is being used in an online context, it does not mean customers don’t have any offline experiences. Consider physical context and direct, personal interaction! Is your online shop accessible to everyone? What do customer reviews tell others about your customer service? This is something you will  learn from Google Analytics!

Call to action: create online shopping journey maps!

Empty template for an e-commerce journey map

It’s time to create your own journey map!

Download this set of paper templates , or start creating digital journey maps with Smaply !

Create user-focused journey maps to understand the user experience and innovate your services. Smaply lets you easily create e-commerce journey maps, personas, and ecosystem maps with an in-app template.

Sign up now, it's free!

online shopping journey map

Antonia Cramer

Antonia keeps her eyes open for questions people interested in service design are looking to answer, and helps us provide resources to support their learning ambitions. With her background in digital communication she has great knowledge on how to create content that is easy to access and understand.

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  • Jun 3, 2022
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The eCommerce customer journey and how to map it

how to map the ecommerce customer journey

Think about the last purchase you made.

How long did it take you to click ‘buy’? How many different sites, ads, emails, and stores did you check out before finally fetching your wallet?

Suffice to say that the typical buyer journey is anything but linear. Few shoppers convert right away, and every brand is challenged with adjusting their eCommerce marketing strategy to anticipate buyer movements both online and offline.

So, what can you do to stay ahead? Let’s talk more about what the eCommerce customer journey entails, and how to map your customer’s path to purchase when starting your business .

What is the eCommerce customer journey?

5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey, what factors affect the customer journey, customer journey mapping: why it’s a must, how to map the buyer journey for your business, example of a journey map.

Every so often, a buyer will take a relatively straight path to purchase. They'll search for a product, find your item, and within the same sitting, they'll complete the purchase.

But much more often, customers will be “pinballed” between various touchpoints. They’ll see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads in a day as they’re scrolling through their phones, checking their emails, or listening to Spotify. Then, once they decide to do some shopping, they’ll likely hop between Amazon, your site, and a competitor’s shop.

The eCommerce customer journey is the sum of all of these interactions (see our guide on what is eCommerce ). It begins with the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand to when he or she finally makes a purchase.

Some buyers will convert within mere days—while others may take several months or years. Tipping the scale towards the former outcome will require understanding the core stages and touchpoints of the customer journey and knowing how to make the best impact on your buyers.

Your customers’ overall journey can be broken down into five key stages.

01. Awareness

Your customer stumbles across your brand for the first time. Be it through an ad, social media, word of mouth, or SEO–they are now aware of your products. However, as noted earlier, many will not convert right away. Some may not even be looking to purchase anything at all.

At this stage, you’ll want to make sure you understand how people are finding your brand and who they are. Are they the buyer personas you expected to reach? How do demographics, acquisition source, and other factors affect what action your audience takes next?

While many visitors at this stage may just be “window browsing,” you’ve at least built some sort of brand recognition. Now it’s time to do something with it: retarget people, learn more about their interests, and guide them towards products that are most relevant to them.

02. Consideration

At this point, your buyer shows actual interest in your product. They’ve got their eyes on a particular product or set of products, and are deciding which one is worth buying.

Some may be trying to decide whether your item is a need versus a want. Others may be checking out product specs to make sure that your item is worth the price. Still others may be deal hunting or checking out options on competitive sites.

In any case, you’ll want to track which product pages people are spending the most time on, which products they’re comparing, and what other brands are on their radar. How can you convince them that your product is better? What can you do to build their confidence in your brand or incentivize a purchase?

03. Decision

Alas, your buyer makes a purchase on your site—assuming that the checkout process is easy and buyer friendly.

Your number one goal here is to make sure that the checkout process is seamless. Create a simple checkout flow, offer multiple (and secure) payment options, communicate your return policy, and provide all the information buyers need to feel supported by your brand.

Buyers should know when to expect their packages and any fees associated with their purchase. Don’t let any unwelcome surprises or lack of information lead to customers canceling their orders early.

04. Retention

Once a buyer makes their first purchase with your brand, they’ll ideally become a repeat customer . A positive customer experience—including excellent customer service, on-time delivery, and a multichannel marketing strategy—can work together to build customer loyalty .

Note that even though you’ve won the first sale, you’ll need to continuously earn a buyer’s patronage time and time again. Be consistent in your messaging. Engage buyers frequently. Offer incentives or employ strategies for upselling and cross-selling .

05. Advocacy

Happy customers have the potential to attract other happy customers. Buyers at this final leg of the customer journey are (hopefully) so happy with your product and/or service that they’re eager to spread the word to their friends and family.

Of course, this isn’t a passive activity. You’ll want to proactively nurture brand ambassadors by creating a customer loyalty program , hosting giveaways, showing appreciation, and taking other steps to inspire advocacy.

Your customers are a moving target. Between their unique preferences and backgrounds—plus their prior experiences with brands—there are tons of factors that shape the way they make their purchases.

As you track the various ways that customers interact with your brand, consider how trends like the ones below can make a big impact on the buyer journey.

Social and economic changes - e.g., the recent pandemic. These events tend to spur shifts in buying behaviors and expectations, as many types of businesses and buyers alike adapt to new realities. With each shift, consumers tend to get smarter and potentially pickier on what defines a good value and how to spend their money.

Convergence of online and offline shopping - Omnichannel retail isn’t just a concept anymore. Today, the lines between the offline and online worlds are increasingly blurred—with digital native brands like Warby Parker opening physical showrooms, and longtime retailers like T.J. Maxx investing more in online commerce. Curbside pickup, BOPIS, and in-store returns are just the beginning of what’s to come; brands should expect the customer journey to entail a greater mix of online and offline touchpoints, regardless of whether a customer originated online or not.

Corporate responsibility - Brands today are expected to do good. Inactivity or a difference in values could shape a customer’s engagement with your brand at any point of the buyer’s journey.

Choice paralysis - The proliferation of brands and products online have the ability to frustrate consumers. Make sure that your website is organized in such a way that customers know exactly where to find what they’re looking for. Make it easier for them to filter out noise and/or compare similar options. The last thing you want is for an overabundance of options—or poor site design—to deter your customers from buying. Learn more about combatting choice paralysis .

While customer journey mapping is an imperfect science, the benefits are undeniable.

In fact, 30% of surveyed retailers reported significant improvements in customer lifetime value and customer advocacy after investing in digital customer experience (CX). Roughly 23% reported an increase in average order size as well.

This exercise can help you to achieve multiple goal including:

Getting more clarity over how buyers interact with you - By carefully mapping your customer journey, you can gain a clear understanding of your buyers and their habits. A map helps you to see things from the buyer's perspective rather than your business’s perspective.

Improving customer retention rates - A map helps you to identify when and why prospective buyers are dropping. For example, an ill-worded message or one displayed in the wrong place at the wrong time could be all that’s causing buyers to regress in their journey. By making strategic changes and reducing friction in the customer experience, you can enjoy an easier time attracting and retaining buyers.

Sharpening your focus and organization - This exercise will force you to lay everything on the table–from all of your marketing campaigns to all the possible interactions a customer may have with your brand. From there, you can determine the health of each channel, who owns which touchpoint, and realistic goals for each event.

Increasing revenue - When you understand how buyers interact with your business in detail, you can more accurately cater your communications, offers, content, and promotions to influence sales. It’s all too easy to rely on assumptions or old habits when engaging customers. A journey map helps to shed light on biases and pain points that you may not have known were there before.

So how do you actually map the customer journey? Here are five steps to get you started.

Step 1. Describe your buyer personas

Before building a map, you must clearly define your target customer types. Are you looking to engage parents, young adults, or consumers with specific hobbies?

Your personas should include as much detail as possible. Make sure to base them around real data—not made-up, fake, or idealistic data. Talk to various stakeholders, interview your customers, consult social media, or perform user testing.

In other words, don't build a buyer profile based on what you think a customer should look like. Create your buyer personas using actual data you gathered from the places where they hang out and from talking directly to your target audience.

Step 2. Define the main character of your map

Now, you can decide which set of customers you’d like to analyze as part of the journey mapping process. The map will look different for each type of buyer you target, and trying to address all of them at once will only muddy the data.

To start, pick the most common persona (i.e., the most valuable or largest cohort). You’ll have an easier time collecting data this way, plus taking meaningful action from your journey map.

Step 3. Analyze on-site behaviors

As an initial step, check out the behaviors on your website and jot down the top pages that people enter your site from, where they exit or bounce, and which ones are the highest converting. Tools like Google Analytics and Wix Analytics can help to fill in these blanks.

To get more specific, make sure to filter your data according to criteria that’s most relevant to your buyer persona: geo, new versus returning users, and device (to name a few).

You may already start to see areas where people drop off and opportunities to optimize your site. You can additionally gain insight into what your buyer is more interested in buying based on where they linger on your site (though note that this could be heavily influenced by how accessible a page is from other areas of your site).

Step 4. List all other customer touchpoints

List out all the ways that your target buyer can interact with your company, both on and off your site. Include things like:

Social media

Review sites

Publications

Popup stores

Onsite banners

Physical stores

Marketplaces that you sell on

Help center

Loyalty program

Seasonal promotions

From here, you’ll want to list out all the possible actions someone could take from each channel. For instance, when someone interacts with a blog, he or she may subscribe to your newsletter, download a piece of content that you promote, click to another blog—or even request a demo. Alternatively, your visitor may bounce.

The purpose of this exercise is to audit all the CTAs you include on a single page, as well as links and other messaging that may influence a visitor’s behaviors. You’ll moreover want to look into whether reality aligns with expectations.

When you compare your list of expected behaviors with the data you gathered from Google Analytics, Wix Analytics, and other sources—do the results align? How can you better define the purpose of each channel, and match your goals with a visitor intent?

Step 5. Visualize the journey

Finally, you can document all of your findings into one easy-to-reference map. The scope of your journey map can vary depending on your goal. For instance, you could show the complete customer journey (as shown below) or hone in on just a part of it where you see the most room for improvement.

A map may cover everything from a buyer’s emotions, to their actions, to roles and responsibilities on your team at each stage. It can serve as both a tool for predicting buyer behaviors and keeping your team organized.

That said, there are several types of journey maps you can create:

Current state map - This shows how customers interact with your brand today. You could use it to compare behaviors between two different segments of buyers, or to uncover how customer emotions and behaviors vary depending on how they find your products (as an example).

Future state map - This illustrates the ideal journey that you want your customers to take. It helps your team rally around specific goals and identify critical points of a customer’s journey.

Day in the life map - This is similar to a current state map, except that it doesn’t start and end with a buyers’ interaction with your brand. It aims to understand all of their daily activities and lifestyles, with the goal of developing new, meaningful touchpoints.

Service blueprints - This takes a simplified version of one of the maps above, then adds in details about the various people, technologies, and processes that take place behind the scenes. The purpose is to audit and optimize how your team functions in the background to support the customer journey.

Let’s imagine that you own an online shop for pet supplies. You want to create a current state map in order to see how your core customers (new dog owners) are interacting with your brand. Your map may look something like this.

This helps your team keep track of the most effective campaigns, products, and channels. You’ll likely look to expand upon this map soon, as you get even more granular in your research or launch new campaigns.

There is no right or wrong way to create an eCommerce journey map. The framework outlined here is just meant to provide a good starting point. Once you have a baseline, you can continue to modify and rework your journey map to fit your unique business.

Remember that the customer journey is constantly evolving. Re-evaluate your eCommerce journey map once a quarter or at least once every six months. Aim to reduce friction in the customer journey and put assumptions to the test.

online shopping journey map

Allison Lee

Editor, Wix eCommerce

Allison is the editor for the Wix eCommerce blog, with several years of experience reporting on eCommerce news, strategies, and founder stories.

  • Sell Online

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How to Create an Ecommerce Customer Journey Map and Optimize for Sales

online shopping journey map

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“I saw an ad for running shoes on Instagram, so I visited the store’s product page, read a review, and bought them.” — your (ideal) customer

As much as we’d like to think the steps someone takes to purchase from your store are always this simple, the reality is: they’re often far from it! Consumers switch between devices, channels, and platforms in the weeks leading up to a purchase.

And this information—their journey—can be crucial for you as you scale your brand.

A customer journey map shows the activities shoppers undergo prior to purchasing a product online (and can even extend to post-purchase activity). By understanding the pathway to purchase through your ecommerce site, you can better craft the right messaging to reach target customers , at the right time.

Below we’ll share how to create your own customer journey map, with tips on how to spot drop-off points and fix them.

The result? A positive customer experience that makes someone’s decision to purchase faster, easier, and friction-free.

This guide will cover:

What is a customer journey map?

The benefits of customer journey mapping, how to build a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how people purchase products. You might see it called the “buyer journey” or “user journey map” as well.

In the case of ecommerce brands, a customer journey map shows:

  • When a customer first became aware of a problem
  • The options they considered when searching for a solution
  • Why they decided to purchase your product

Take a look at this customer journey map example below by Nielsen Norman Group , which shows the touchpoints a customer has prior to buying a new car.

So-called “Emotional Eric” goes from seeing a TV commercial about a car company, through to downloading the mobile app, visiting a dealership, and driving away with a new vehicle. The map displays Eric’s thoughts, feelings, and considerations at each point in the journey, giving the dealership’s marketers greater insight into what Eric needs to see before converting.

Example of a customer journey map

There are up to 24 million ecommerce websites in the world—many of which sell comparable products to those in your own inventory. Customers have more choices than ever. But what made existing customers—those who’ve given you their hard-earned cash—choose you?

Understanding the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and objections at each touchpoint gives you greater insight to improve your online store’s conversion rate.

Using the example of Emotional Eric, the dealership selling the car can use the customer journey map to:

  • Personalize messaging . Purchase decisions depend largely on the content someone sees throughout their journey. Greater insight into thoughts, motivations, and customer pain points helps the dealership’s marketers produce materials that cater to Eric’s needs—from dedicated landing pages to social media posts.
  • Understand channel performance. Your ecommerce brand may spend equal amounts of time on Instagram and Facebook. But a customer journey map could reveal TV commercials and Facebook advertising are the two channels that drive the most awareness with new customers. It makes sense to maximize ROI and double down on those channels instead.
  • Prioritize user experience changes. If we come to learn Eric is disappointed by the quality of images in the mobile app, uploading new images can become a priority for the dealership. It’s a leak in their customer journey map that needs to be plugged to prevent other prospective customers from abandoning a purchase.

Nik Sharma tweet

Not convinced on the power of journey mapping? High-performing teams are 1.6 times more likely to use customer journey management.

Though these personalization tactics aren’t just marketing checkboxes to tick. It’s a purchase motivator for the 65% of people who’d become a long-term customer of a store that provides a positive experience throughout the entire customer journey.

“Customer journey mapping heavily relies upon how the information is relayed to its target audience. The message should be clear and concise so that even a layperson has no trouble understanding the message.” — Albert Vaisman , founder of Soxy

When creating your own ecommerce customer journey map, you can focus on components of the journey (instead of taking on absolutely everything).

Though, as seen below, the highest performers are three times more likely to use customer journey orchestration, and two times more likely to analyze customer interactions over three or more channels over time. There’s a connection between how detailed you map your customer journey and the results you’ll reap!

This can guide your investment in the process.

Stats on journey-based methods

#cta-visual-pb#Create a high-converting shopping experience that meets customers where they’re atYour perfect store is waiting for you to build it. Start building with Shogun today

Ready to uncover the steps a customer takes before purchasing your product? Here’s a step-by-step journey mapping process to create one for your ecommerce business.

1. Segment your audience

It’s impossible to lump all customers in one bucket. Different customers have different preferences, and use cases differ from product to product.

People who buy your toothpaste bundle won’t be solving the same problems as customers purchasing a teeth whitening kit.

“Some ecommerce brands don’t research enough, or the research they carry out is weak. You can’t start making a journey map through guessing.” — Ai Hiura , CMO and chief editor at FAVERIE

When building your customer journey map, don’t paint all customers with the same brush. Segment your audience by the traits they share, such as:

  • Demographics. The beauty of ecommerce is selling products to anyone, anywhere. But scaling a global brand comes with its own challenges—like cultural differences. The shopping habits of European consumers differ from American consumers. You’ll want to consider segmenting out customers based on geographic location.
  • Job to be done. The JTBD framework expresses the goal someone wants to achieve when purchasing a product. If you’re selling sneakers with your ecommerce website, for example, this can range from “look fashionable” to “support my feet when running.” You’ll want to identify your customer’s “jobs to be done” for various, finer segments of your audience.
  • Product price. Customers purchasing expensive items have longer customer journeys than with cheaper items. The same applies to subscriptions. The higher the commitment, the longer the purchase journey. You can segment your audience by average order value ranges as you create your map.

2. Uncover common touchpoints

Once you’ve isolated your customer personas with segmentation, it’s time to conduct research.

Our goal at this point is to uncover the touchpoints a potential customer has prior to purchasing. Here’s how you can find them.

Collect customer data

There’s no better way to understand your customers than talking to them.

Aaron Masterson, founder of Local Furniture Outlet , says, “While it may be tempting to believe that we know more about our customers than we do, doing additional research that provides valuable data through interviews and analytics is the best way to approach building a customer journey map.

“Since customer journey maps are all about customers, it would be a mistake not to involve them when building one. Without putting customers at the center of focus, it is not possible to completely represent their experiences.”

Find the touchpoints previous customers had with your brand via order confirmation emails. Follow-up their purchase with an invite to complete a customer feedback survey —or, for more in-depth data, voice of the customer interviews.

Key questions to ask in these conversations include:

  • What was happening in your life when you first decided you wanted to solve a problem?
  • Did you consider any other options before purchasing this product? If so, why did you choose ours?
  • What factors, if any, almost stopped you from purchasing this product?

You can use a market research repository like Userzoom or Aurelius to store all feedback—or a classic spreadsheet. Common themes will begin to appear over time, unveiling the touchpoints for your customer journey map.

#cta-paragraph-pb# Read more on creating buyer profiles: How—And Why—You Should Use Buyer Profiles and Quizzes for Your Store

Analyze your website activity and drop off points

While customer interviews are a great source of data, you’re not going to get the full picture of how people engage with your brand pre-purchase through interviews alone.

People forget about steps they’ve taken, thoughts they had, or content they engaged with. Customers also have a different point of view—even if they did take the same path to purchase.

Lift the lid on how potential customers engage with your website through:

  • On-site surveys. Expand your data by surveying people in the middle of the customer journey—not just those who’ve completed it. Understand the frame of mind of a website visitor on your product page by asking, “What problem are you looking to solve?”
  • Heatmaps. Software like Hotjar and Mouseflow shows “hot” parts of your website—places a visitor pays the most attention to. If you’re selling coolers through your online store, for example, you might find that people spend time reading whether items inside the box can withstand desert temperatures on a specific site page about this. That’s useful data for your customer journey map (maybe you can surface this info in your ads top-of-funnel, for example).  
  • Visitor recordings. Get granular with website activity by watching how people engage with your store. Pay close attention to the order in which they view different pages. Do they go from blog post to landing page to pricing page? Or the opposite direction?
  • Google Analytics . Use the Shopping Behavior Analysis report to discover drop-off points or how many shoppers fall out of the customer journey. It becomes more clear where you need to focus your efforts (maybe you learn your new goal is to increase sessions with “add to cart” if drop off here is particularly noticeable, for example—or that you need to focus on cart abandonment).

Google Analytics Shopping Behavior Analysis

Albert Vaisman explains how they get their starting point mapped at Soxy: “I use direct traffic data when building a customer journey map. This measure provides me insight into how the target audience perceives my brand.

“I use direct traffic in my web analytics tool to observe the number of visitors who manually typed in my company’s URL. Then I compare this metric to other traffic sources. [I can also look at] my website’s bounce rate, optimizing accordingly.”

Mine your social media data

Social media is a hive of activity. Your ecommerce brand can listen in on conversations—even if your brand name isn’t explicitly mentioned—to understand the customer journey for products in your industry.

Adrienne Barnes, founder of Best Buyer Persona , is currently working with her client on this process. For shoe retailer Kuru Footwear , “We’re really trying to understand what was going on when a customer was encouraged to start looking for these shoes in particular.

“We’re trying to figure out when, in a buyer journey, do people go from being aware that they have a problem, to being solution or product aware?”

Using the orthopedic shoe example, Adrienne says the prospective customer is likely thinking, “I know that my feet hurt. I need something that’ll stop my feet from hurting. What are the things that I can do?” At this point, they start looking at shoes, insoles, surgery, or chiropractic care. You can see that on social media.”

“Delving into the social media data of the people who follow your brand can supply you with their age, gender, languages, and locations. You can also identify your audience’s interests, which can help you optimize your content strategy to address your target audience’s needs at every stage of the customer journey.” — Shaunak Amin , co-founder and CEO of SnackMagic

Collect team feedback

“A customer journey map is an organization-wide undertaking because the customer interacts with basically every part of a business,” says Stephen Light, CMO and co-owner of Nolah Mattress.

“Maps simply won’t be as effective as they could be without input from those actually delivering the customer’s experience.”

Merge the data you’ve got at this point from customers with your internal team feedback. Consult the following people to corroborate your existing data:

  • Sales teams
  • Stakeholders
  • Customer support agents
  • Social media managers

Chances are, they’ll have direct experience talking with your customers—valuable data you should add to your buyer journey map.

Validate your research

Not all data you collect throughout this process is 100% accurate.

“If you don’t talk to your customers and you’re not validating the things you see in your data, you could be putting the steps in the wrong place or making assumptions that aren’t true,” says Adrienne Barnes.

“We really put a microscope on the moment they decided to change or purchase a new product. That helps me identify: was it on social media? Was it within a Facebook group? An ad? I like to ask via interviews and verify via digital intelligence.”

As Adrienne says:

“People tell me, ‘I first heard about the product because I saw an ad on Instagram.’ I can go and look through analytics and internal data to see whether we’re actually doing that—including the conversions we’ve had and what [value props] we’re talking to within the ad.”

3. Organize customer touchpoints

At this point, you have more data than you know what to do with. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Start making sense of your data by organizing touchpoints into different silos.

There’s no “best practice” for labelling these categories, though it makes sense to model your customer journey map on the marketing funnel.

Let’s put this into practice for building a customer journey map for an ecommerce business. For example, shoppers purchasing blue light-blocking glasses have the following touchpoints at each stage:

Customer Journey Map

Next, you’ll add context around the thoughts and feelings the customer experiences at each stage in the buyer’s journey. This includes:

  • Questions they’re asking
  • Pain points they’re experiencing
  • Actions they’re planning to take

Then, refine every interaction you have with your customer—including site content/copy, messaging, and your marketing strategy—to address each point at the right time . Each is an opportunity to personalize your approach and close the deal.

For example, if we learn that those shopping for blue light glasses need to see proof that they work (because they’ve tried solutions that don’t), you’re going to want to include this prominently across your ecommerce site:

  • Endorsements from optometrists (social proof)
  • References to scientific studies that prove the validity of blue-light glasses
  • Case studies from previous customers whose eyes have stopped hurting because of the glasses

Consider as well that user-generated content could be a great way to address something like the consideration or comparison phases of the journey.

If we realize that in the consideration stage the customer wants to try on the glasses, maybe your eyewear brand needs to invest in a virtual try-on interaction on the site to help alleviate questions the customer has around the size of the glasses (something that’s difficult to judge online vs. in-store).

Warby Parker takes this approach with its mobile app . Shoppers can overlay eyewear onto a livestream of their face—much like a Snapchat filter—to see which suits them.

Warby Parker mobile app

Finally, as customers reach the decision stage, they need one final vote of confidence before hitting “confirm order.”

If they’re struggling to overcome an expensive pair of blue light-blocking glasses, for example:

  • Promote a free at-home trial or risk-free order
  • Cross-sell lower priced items
  • Show the shelf-life of your glasses (i.e. a $299 pair of your glasses every two years is cheaper than replacing $199 glasses yearly)

4. Identify points of friction

The goal of a customer journey map is to uncover the thoughts and feelings your target customer has prior to purchasing your product.

But not everyone will make it through the entire funnel. Customers fall out of the buying journey for several reasons—some of which are outside of your control; others you have the power to prevent.

Use the data collected earlier, including Google Analytics’ Shopping Behavior Analysis report, to uncover points at which customers stop engaging with your brand. This might be:

  • When they switch devices
  • When they exit your website
  • When they read a specific piece of content

Once you isolate where customers are dropping off, you can make tweaks to your site and marketing materials to fix!

5. Improve your map’s conversion rate

Found the gaps in your customer journey? Next, plug the leaks and improve your conversion rate .

You’ll get customers from homepage to products, to purchase, and into post-purchase flows with as little friction as possible when you put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

For example, a consumer in the consideration stage falls out of the buying journey because they switched devices and couldn’t remember the name of the site they viewed. The potential fix might be a pop-up modal encouraging your website visitors to opt into SMS or email marketing (so the drop-off isn’t permanent!).

Similarly, you might find that customers fall out of the purchase journey because they haven’t found a solution to their problem. In this case, understand the customer’s perspective and:

  • Run A/B tests on the site pages with the highest number of drop-offs to test your hypotheses of what needs to be added to this content to convert based on your new learnings.
  • Cross-sell different items better positioned to the customer’s motivation you discovered with your customer journey map research
  • Showcase social proof from customers suffering with the same issue your visitor has

Is your ecommerce website customer-centric?

As we’ve covered, in its simplest form, a customer journey map shows the touchpoints a shopper takes when purchasing items online, and you can even carry it into post-purchase.

Remember that while we can do our best to organize these touchpoints, your ecommerce customer journey map may never be entirely accurate—and that’s ok! As Adrienne Barnes says, “We like to think of a customer journey map as a linear process, but in reality, it’s pretty convoluted and messy.

“Have an awareness that the customer isn’t always going to follow your streamlined idea of a buyer journey. They have a whole life that purchasing your product is a minuscule piece of.”

Overall, work to uncover the touchpoints customers have for your ecommerce brand and craft the messaging your shoppers need. You’ll position your products in the right place, at the right time, to the right people—a winning formula for sales.

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Customer journey maps are used to anticipate the needs and motivations of customers as they embark on various journeys in relation to your brand.

Not only does mapping out these processes step-by-step help you to understand and visualize the journey your customers make with your brand, but it also improves and streamlines this process over time so you can provide a memorable and positive customer experience in the future.

What is a customer journey map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the different stages your customers go through when encountering your brand and provides a detailed picture as to the customer experience. While many use customer journey mapping to visualize the buying process, customer journey mapping can also be used for other journeys such as the sales process, or onboarding.

Some key features of a customer journey map is the division of the journey into specific stages, the use of a customer persona (a profile of your target customer), a consideration of all touchpoints where your customer interacts with your brand throughout their journey, as well as a really thoughtful approach to how your customer feels during the journey — what their actions, thoughts, and obstacles are.

The benefits of a customer journey map

A customer journey map can be a hugely beneficial thing for any business by helping them clearly see the journey that their customer experiences with their brand and enabling them to understand where they can improve for the future to provide a better customer experience. For those of you looking to create a customer journey for the buying process, assessing the journey, as well as your customer persona in detail, will make it easier to convert inbound leads into customers by reducing friction at each touchpoint, thereby allowing leads to more easily progress through the journey and turn into customers.

However, customer journey maps, when done right, also have the added benefit of showing you where your actual product or services are lacking. By putting yourself into your customer’s shoes, you can more easily identify desirable new features and solutions you can introduce to solve your customers’ problems.

Customer journey maps aren’t beneficial for simply external purposes; crafting a customer journey map can clarify internal roles and processes by pinpointing where each team is interacting with the customer and at which stages, as well as effectively keeping all teams within your business aligned on the same customer-focused goals.

Further reading: Strengthening customer loyalty

Building your customer journey map can be simpler with a template. Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:

online shopping journey map

How to build a customer journey map

1. set goals.

Before you begin to create your customer journey map, it’s crucial that you identify why you’re creating your map in the first place and what you’re looking to achieve. Setting goals before you begin will make sure that you are focusing on the right aspects during the crafting of your map, as well as ensure that you are creating the right kind of customer journey map to fit your purpose. Some examples of goals might include increasing sales and retention, or improving onboarding.

2. Customer persona research

A customer persona is a document that outlines exactly who your ideal customer is. While information such as age, gender, location, and industry are all important, your customer persona document should go deeper by including information such as motivations, frustrations, habits, lifestyle, income, job level, and professional skills. When researching your customer persona, you may choose to talk directly to your customers, use surveys to collect information, examine your social media analytics, practice social listening, or check in with your customer service reps.

Further reading: How to create a buyer persona in four steps

3. Begin mapping out the journey

Now it’s time to loosely begin mapping out the journey your customers go through. If you’re creating a customer journey map of the sales process, you might start by considering where your customers first encounter your brand, through to what interactions they have with your business, before finally making a purchase. Make a list that covers all the key steps involved, including whether your leads are inbound or outbound, how they discover your brand, if they visit a certain number of pages on your website before deciding to make a purchase, and if they have any contact with your customer service or sales team, among others. A customer journey map template can help you visualize and lay out the appropriate stages in your process, before adding in the details.

A customer buying journey will typically feature four distinct stages:

  • Awareness: when customers first become aware of your brand
  • Consideration: when customers are evaluating your brand and comparing you to competitors
  • Decision: when customers are ready to make a purchase
  • Post-sales: the customer experience after a purchase has been made, including repeat purchases, customer loyalty, and post-sale customer support

4. Pick out customer touchpoints

Following along with the journey you’ve begun mapping, it’s time to work out where your touchpoints are, a.k.a. all the ways in which your brand encounters a customer at any stage in the journey.

You can easily categorize your touchpoints into digital customer gateways, such as social media, online ads, emails, live chat, website content, influencers, video demos, and product reviews, or physical customer touchpoints like events, print marketing materials, product packaging, and business cards.

Listing every touchpoint will provide an even clearer picture of when and where your brand makes contact with your customers throughout their journey.

5. Putting it all together

Now it’s time to take your list of stages that your customer experiences with your brand, and start combining it with your touchpoints. Begin by defining your customer journey map stages and then go into detail for each stage on what exactly your customer is experiencing and at what stages your touchpoints are occurring. After you’ve completed this, it’s time to think a little deeper by adding actions, emotions, and pain points.

Using the research you carried out on your customer persona, try to predict how your customers feel at each stage, where they might have questions, what actions they may take, any pain points they could encounter, and what their motivations are at any particular moment.

Keep things flexible — not all these elements will be easy to associate with specific stages or touchpoints, so feel free to make the connections where you see them. If you’re working with a customer journey map template in Adobe Express, it’s simple to adapt your design to your liking by adding or removing sections as you see fit.

6. Collect feedback

Now it’s time to begin sharing your map with your team for feedback and additional thoughts that you might have not considered. You may also want to run a test of your customer journey map to ensure that you haven’t neglected to include any touchpoints or learnings along the way. Once your customer map is complete, you can then share it with your wider team as well as use it to look for opportunities for improvement.

A customer journey map will provide the ultimate clarity on where you can do better by shining a light on any obvious gaps in your process or areas in which an additional touchpoint may be necessary to improve your customer experience. While the hard work might be out of the way once your customer journey map is complete, the real benefit of this exercise is to understand the customer’s point of view and where you can continue to improve in the future.

Ready to get started? Check out our range of customer journey map templates in Adobe Express:

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Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template

Online Buying Customer Journey Map Template

Customize, design, and edit the Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template to visualize your customer's online experience. With a clean layout and a teal, orange, and white color scheme, this template is perfect for e-commerce businesses and marketers. Highlight key phases, emotions, and expectations. Explore more mind maps templates on Venngage for your projects.

  • Design style vintage
  • Colors light
  • Size Letter (11 x 8.5 in)
  • File type PNG, PDF, PowerPoint
  • Plan premium

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Online Shopping Customer Journey Map

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An Online Shopping Customer Journey Map visualizes the sequence of experiences a customer goes through when engaging with an e-commerce platform. It starts with the initial awareness or discovery phase, moves through consideration and decision-making as the customer browses products, and leads to purchase. The map continues beyond the sale to include post-purchase interactions such as customer support, delivery, and potential returns, highlighting key touchpoints that influence customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You can easily edit this template using Creately's business process mapping tool . You can export it in multiple formats like JPEG, PNG and SVG and easily add it to Word documents, Powerpoint (PPT) presentations, Excel or any other documents. You can export it as a PDF for high-quality printouts.

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5 practical ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey (with real examples)

Either as a consumer or an online business owner, you’ve experienced the ecommerce customer journey.

As a consumer, you came, you saw, you purchased.

As an online business owner, you watched potential customers come, and see, and purchase—or you watched them exit your site, leaving you asking: why?

This article shows you how to find some answers. To keep it practical, we use real examples from designer furniture store MADE.COM, whose former Head of Digital Experience, Spencer Wong, wanted to improve the experience for MADE.COM customers across each stage of their journey

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What is the ecommerce customer journey?

‘Ecommerce customer journey’ describes the stages of a customer’s experience with an online business, from the moment they first become aware of its products to the moment they complete a purchase.

A clear, smooth online experience tends to have a positive impact on your potential customers. For example:

If your website loads quickly and without issues, your product and pricing pages are clear and easy to navigate, and your customer support team is easy to reach, your website visitors might feel comfortable with making a purchase

If your website is slow to load, your product pages are hard to navigate and hide unexpected costs, or there are too many support forms to fill out, your visitors might choose to bounce or exit —which is both an interrupted journey and a missed opportunity

Why is the ecommerce customer journey important?

Your customers develop opinions about your business (and whether or not they want to buy things from you) based on the sum of their interactions with your website. Visualizing these interactions as a ‘journey’ made of separate stages is a convenient way to look at a customer’s experience as a whole, and to understand what they may be looking for and needing at different touchpoints .

Giving thought to the entire customer journey can help you answer important questions, like:

Why did that customer abandon their shopping cart?

Did this person not find what they were looking for?

How can I learn from these customers’ actions on my site?

What changes do I need to make to my ecommerce store to increase conversions?

To find answers, let’s explore what a typical customer journey through your site might look and feel like.

5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey

The concept of ‘customer journey’ is very common in marketing, but your customers themselves may not be aware of—or at least aren’t thinking about—their actions on your website as ‘stages’ in a journey. Rather than  thinking  about each stage, they’re  experiencing  it.

You may be familiar with the traditional terms for the stages of the ecommerce customer journey, which are usually something like:

Consideration

Acquisition

But in the spirit of  customer centricity , we’re choosing to rename the stages of the customer journey to put ourselves in the customers’ shoes.

Here’s quick a visualization of five stages in the ecommerce customer journey, and what each means for your customers:

#Five stages of the ecommerce customer journey, from the customer’s perspective

And here’s how each stage relates to your ecommerce business:

Stage 1: discovery

The customer learns about your product   (“I found a site that sells designer furniture!”)

At this stage, you can learn where customers are coming from, what brought them to your website, which pages they’re landing on and navigating to, and the path that took them from one page to another. This is an opportunity to learn what new customers need—what they’re looking for on your site.

Stage 2: interest

The customer sees something they like, and they begin browsing your site   (“They might have the perfect sofa for our living room—I’m going to take a look.”)

This stage, otherwise known as the consideration stage, might be a good time to figure out how to reduce bounce rates on your main pages and to get prospects to browse more products. This stage presents an opportunity to learn how to help customers find what they’re looking for as they explore your site.

Stage 3: intent

The customer adds items to a wishlist or a shopping cart, but they're still only considering the purchase   (“Oh, this looks great—I’m going to save this for later and see what else I can find.”)

Here, you may be able to identify which page features are working to your advantage and what’s getting prospects to add products to their wishlists and shopping carts. This stage is also where a new marketing channel may enter the journey: the email list (which you can use to capture the addresses of people who are interested, but not ready to commit).

Stage 4: purchase

Also known as the ‘conversion’ stage, this is when the customer buys your product   (“Yep, this is the one! It’s perfect!”)

This is the moment to start building a long-term relationship with your customers, and 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 some quick feedback about what worked (or what didn’t) for people who just finished purchasing from you.

Stage 5: engagement

The customer comes back for more—they may purchase again, engage on social media, subscribe to your newsletter, read articles, and subscribe to customer-only bonuses and upsells   (“I wonder if they have an article with tips on how to care for my new sofa…”)

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

Now that we’ve covered the basics of the customer journey, let’s discuss how you can improve the customer’s experience on your ecommerce site.

5 ways to learn about the ecommerce journey from your customers

A common starting point to understand and improve your customers’ experience on your site is to turn to Google Analytics (GA) data (or another traditional analytics tool). With this tool, you can gain insight on unique pageviews, the average time people spend on each page, bounce rates, exit rates , and even how customers use your site’s ‘search’ bar.

#An example user acquisition report from Google Analytics (Source: Google)

However, there will come a point where metrics from Google Analytics aren’t enough for you to understand exactly what’s going on (or why), which is what Spencer at MADE.COM experienced. He used what he learned from GA to develop ideas about MADE.COM’s user experience (UX) issues—but the quantitative data wasn’t quite specific enough to explain why website visitors were behaving the way they were.

Spencer was also concerned that some of the pain points he hypothesized hadn’t been completely validated with customers, so he turned to tools that would complement the data he was getting from GA. Here’s a breakdown of the strategies he used :

An on-site survey to learn more about the ‘discovery’ stage

Heatmaps to visualize the ‘interest’ and ’intent’ stages

On-page surveys to improve the ‘intent’ and ‘purchase’ stages

Post-purchase surveys to understand the ‘engagement’ stage

And, to give you even more inspiration, we’ve thrown in a bonus strategy to turn to: capturing the bigger picture of the entire customer journey with funnel analysis and session recordings . Let’s take a look at these strategies in more detail.

💡Pro tip: Hotjar's GA integration allows you to connect quantitative and visual data for a more in-depth understanding of customer behavior. While GA shows you what’s happening on your site, we step in to help you understand why those things are happening.

1. Use an on-site survey to learn more about the ‘discovery’ stage

Placing a survey on your main traffic pages (on your homepage, for example) will help you learn more about the discovery or awareness stage of the customer journey, and understand what brought people to your website or to a specific sub-section of it for the first time.

To do this, Spencer placed a survey on the ‘showroom’ section of MADE.COMand asked the straightforward question, “How did you hear about this showroom?” to understand how visitors got there.

#An on-site survey asking visitors how they found the page

If this was your ecom website: a survey like this one would help you get a better sense of which channel(s) or search engines your visitors found you from. Remember that Google Analytics will report on the difference between paid or organic traffic demographics, but it won’t be able to account for sources such as word of mouth, friend referrals, or physical advertising. This is important information to consider, especially if survey results indicate that you should switch up your ecommerce marketing strategy and try catering to different target audiences.

💡Pro tip: on-page surveys can be used to learn even more about your customers’ discovery stage, beyond just how and where they came from. For example, you can place one on your main landing pages and collect extra details by asking:

What did you come here to do today?

What are you looking for today?

Who are you shopping for today?

Using survey tools like Hotjar Surveys will give you real-time feedback that can help you minimize things like customer churn and cart abandonment before they even happen.

Easily build an on-site survey and start collecting customer feedback in minutes with Hotjar

2. Use heatmaps to visualize the ‘interest’ and ’intent’ stages

When MADE.COM launched a new site design with updated navigation options, Spencer used  heatmaps  to see how people were interacting with them and behaving as a result.

#The MADE.COM homepage as of January 2020

With heatmaps, Spencer could see where people hovered over and clicked on the updated navigation options, and compared visitors’ interactions on the new and old versions of the page. This tool helped him illustrate how MADE.COM’s new navigation options were an improvement to the site: the recorded clicks proved that visitors were paying a lot more attention to navigation, which in turn led them to browse the site in new ways—and that’s particularly crucial in the interest stage, where people may be browsing or looking for inspiration.

The heatmap below is not the actual one Spencer used, but it still works in the same way—you can see how far people make it down the page and understand their movements on it:

#Examples of a scroll heatmap (left) and click heatmap (right), where ‘hot’ places with the most interaction are rendered in red

If this was your ecom website : you could use heatmaps before and after a website redesign to evaluate if the changes you make to structure and layout influence customer behavior. You can also use heatmaps on critical ecommerce pages (such as product or basket pages), especially when you want to reduce bounce rates and get more people to convert. Heatmaps help you answer questions such as:

Are prospective customers clicking on key page elements (links, buttons, and CTAs)?

Are they seeing all the important information?

Are they experiencing issues across devices?

If you’re not quite sure how to find the answers to these questions, read more about how to analyze heatmaps and what the conclusions you draw might mean for your next website optimization .

💡Pro tip: Hotjar Heatmaps allows you to visualize click, move, and scroll data in one streamlined view: Engagement Zones .

online shopping journey map

Combine multiple heatmaps with Hotjar’s Engagement Zones map

3. Use on-page surveys to improve the ‘intent’ and ‘purchase’ stages

On-page surveys are not just for the discovery stage: you can use them throughout the customer journey to get constant feedback on how to improve the experience.

For example, Spencer wanted to identify specific journey pain points that were identified by customers themselves. This can be done quickly with an open-ended survey question such as “What’s missing on this page?” or “What’s the one thing we should change on this page?”

#On-page surveys can be used to ask your customers open-ended questions

Using this method, Spencer learned about features that were missing from the site. Above all things, MADE.COM’s customers wanted wishlist capabilities and a more streamlined, customized process for matching fabric samples with the products they were interested in.

If this was your ecom website : you could place an on-page survey to investigate elements specific to the interest and purchase stages, and ask your prospective customers questions throughout the checkout process, such as:

What information is missing or would make your decision to buy easier?

What’s your biggest fear or concern about purchasing this item?

Are you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?

If you’re not making a purchase today, what’s stopping you?

💡Pro tip: when surveying customers to improve their experience, it’s important to ask the right questions so you get the right answers—namely, the answers with the level of detail you need to take action. Once you have specific answers to your questions, you can apply what you’ve learned to your ecommerce customer journey and identify which stages are most affected by each UX issue.

For example:

Don’t just ask : What do you think about our online store?

Ask : What’s one change that we could make to improve your shopping experience?

Don’t just ask : Does this page have everything you need, Yes/No?

Ask : What would you like to see added to the page?

Don’t just ask : Is our website easy to use, Yes/No?

Ask : Were you able to find what you were looking for today?

If you find yourself stuck coming up with engaging questions, get inspired by Hotjar’s customizable survey templates or try Hotjar's new AI-powered surveys assistant .

4. Use post-purchase surveys to understand the ‘engagement’ stage

Your customers’ journey doesn’t have to end when they buy something—ideally, you want them to come back and become repeat customers. Sending a post-purchase survey via email and asking new customers for feedback is a great way to learn about what almost stopped them from converting  and  what might stop them from returning again.

online shopping journey map

Assess customer loyalty with post-purchase surveys like the Net Promoter Score ®

At MADE.COM, Spencer was able to confirm that customers were interested in financing options. He asked direct questions about financing to learn what was most important to the customer, which options they wanted to see, and if they had a vendor preference. This turned out to be useful information for both the purchase and engagement stages, as it helped Spencer paint a clearer picture of an additional need that prospective and existing customers had when considering a first or repeat purchase.

If this was your ecom website: you could email a survey to your customers, or—if you want to go faster—simply set one to appear on your thank-you page after a customer’s order is confirmed. Use it to ask customer satisfaction questions such as:

How would you rate your overall experience?

What can we do to improve the experience?

What almost stopped you from completing your purchase?

💡Pro tip: worried about the number of customers that exit your site before making a purchase? Understand why your customers are leaving (and not converting) with Hotjar’s exit-intent survey template .

5. Understand the entire customer journey with funnel analysis and session recordings

In addition to the stage-based strategies Spencer implemented when optimizing the customer journey at MADE.COM, it can be extremely useful to zoom out and take a look at the whole buyer’s journey holistically. This is where two tools— funnel analysis and session recordings —come in.

Funnel analysis

The term ‘funnel’ describes the path ecommerce site visitors take and how it inevitably narrows as some people decide to leave the site or become a customer at the end of their journey. 

With ‘funnel analysis’, you trace the customer journey through specific steps (or web pages) that, hopefully, result in conversions or signups, so you can optimize the process by analyzing how many visitors end up in each stage. Knowing when your potential customers drop off at each stage is imperative for increasing your site’s lifetime value and conversion rates.

#See where customers drop off or fail to convert throughout their journey with funnel analysis

Session recordings

Using funnel analysis in tandem with a second tool—session recordings—will reveal your customers’ behaviors in high-definition. Are you left wondering why a lot of customers exit from a certain page in your funnel? Find out what might be missing from their online shopping experience by watching how customers behave throughout their entire journey.

Session recordings allow you to capture not only how visitors navigate through your site, they can help you uncover website usability issues that prevent visitors from making a purchase.

💡Pro tip: Hotjar integrates Recordings directly with Funnels , so you can  identify pain points in your most important flows by watching recordings of potential customers who didn’t convert and make it to the next step.

Hotjar Funnels and Recordings can help identify what customer touchpoints throughout the journey affect your conversion rates

Focus on your customers

A final thing to remember: when it comes down to it, your ecommerce website is for your customers. By learning more about customers’ needs and behaviors through the five methods we just discussed, you’ll be five steps closer to giving them the clearest, smoothest path on their ecommerce journey.

📚 More reading: learn how to improve the user experience and increase revenue with these user-driven tools and methods for running ecommerce website analysis .

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  • What is a Customer Journey Map?
  • Current State
  • Day in the Life
  • Future State
  • Service Blueprint
  • Stages of Your Customer Journey Map:
  • Touchpoints Customers Interact With:
  • Action at Different Stages & Touchpoints:
  • Thoughts & Emotions:
  • Departments Involved Throughout the Journey:
  • Pain Points & Solutions:
  • sales-funnel-vs-customer-journey-map"> Sales Funnel vs Customer Journey Map
  • Step 1: Define the Scope, Goals, and Hypotheses
  • Step 2: Gather Existing Data
  • Step 3: Collect New Data for Your Buyer Persona
  • Step 4: Build Your Buyer Persona
  • Step 5: Map All the Key Factors
  • Step 6: Monitor and Analyze the Results
  • Step 7: Update at Regular Intervals
  • Customer Journey Map Templates
  • Improved systems & strategies:
  • Finding areas of improvement & opportunities:
  • Enhanced customer experience:
  • Better brand loyalty:
  • Final Thoughts on Customer Journey Map
  • FAQ about Creating a Customer Journey Map

How to Create a Customer Journey Map + Templates [2024]

How to Create a Customer Journey Map + Templates [2024]

To build a great brand, you need to know your customers every step of the way.

Of course, we all love the final output — i.e., getting sales and making profits — but that output comes after a journey. Also, this journey goes beyond the initial purchase. Yes, we’re talking about retention and brand loyalty. 

A customer journey map helps you not only visualize all these details but also enhance the entire customer journey.

So, in this blog article, we’ll share a detailed guide on “ how to create a customer journey map ” , the types and key factors of a customer journey map, and the benefits of this entire process.

To understand the customer journey map, let’s put ourselves in the customer’s shoes.

Imagine this — 

You want to buy a new digital camera. First, you’ll try to learn about the available brand options via Google Search and shortlist some brands.

Then, you may go through the specifications, pricing comparisons, and customer reviews to make the decision. And finally, make the purchase.

After purchase, you may also be involved in support interactions or leave a review for the brand. This entire series of interactions with a brand is your customer journey.

During this journey, you may take multiple actions and go through different types of thoughts and emotions.

So, now let’s understand this from a brand’s perspective:

A customer journey map is a visual and hypothetical depiction of your ideal customer’s interactions with your brand and product — in a series of stages covering Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Post-purchase, and Re-purchase.

During all these stages, your customer may interact with your brand at multiple touchpoints and go through various thoughts and emotions.

Although this visual map is hypothetical, it’s created based on real data, research, and feedback from customers. In other words, this map isn’t created based on mere assumptions but on data and logic.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

The “current state” customer journey map focuses on the actions and emotions that customers are going through in their current interactions with your brand.

This approach helps identify ongoing issues, fix them in real time, and enhance the customer experience.

The "day in the life" customer journey map depicts the typical actions and emotions customers go through in their daily lives regardless of their interactions with your brand.

This approach helps you identify any other pain points of your customers, and build a solution for the same. So, it could be helpful to expand your offerings.

The “future state” customer journey map visualizes the actions and emotions your customers are likely to go through in the future when interacting with your brand.

This approach helps set your goals and prepare the strategies.

The "service blueprint" customer journey map focuses on all the touchpoints based on any one of the above types of maps. Then, it aligns a list of fundamentals required for all the touchpoints such as human resources, policies, processes, and technologies.

This approach helps utilize the resources in the best possible manner.

GemPages

Key Factors in a Customer Journey Map

Depending on the format or template of your customer journey map, you can consider different elements in your customer journey map.

Generally, you may consider all these factors:

Here are the stages a customer goes through during a journey:

  • Awareness: The customer becomes aware of the problem and finds out about your brand and its solution.
  • Consideration: The customer starts considering multiple different options or solutions to resolve the problem.
  • Purchase: The customer finally purchases your product.
  • Post-purchase: This stage covers the post-purchase services and interactions.
  • Re-purchase: This stage focuses on the actions and interactions that lead to repeat purchases and building brand loyalty.

A touchpoint is a channel-specific event where a customer interacts with your brand for various reasons — positive or negative. For example, when a customer interacts with your live chat team before a purchase, it may lead to positive emotions or some sort of disappointment.

What actions are customers likely to take at each stage and touchpoint? By figuring out all possible actions, you can better prepare your system, processes, and people. For example, if a customer is unable to find an answer through a FAQ or chatbot, the customer is likely to seek human support.

When you’re preparing all the stages and touchpoints of your customer journey map, you also need to map the emotions that customers go through in those phases.

For example, after making a purchase, if a customer reaches out to your customer support team for an issue with delivery, a customer is likely to be annoyed or angry.

This is somewhat related to the touchpoints that we discussed; however, it is highly possible that multiple touchpoints may fall under a single department. For example, when talking of a marketing department, it covers multiple touchpoints such as the email newsletter, blog, social media channels, etc.

Consider any challenges or barriers that your customers have to face during the journey. Based on these pain points, you can derive new solutions.

Here’s an example of a customer journey map template from Canva that shows how these factors can be placed on a visual map:

Customer journey map template on Canva

Sales Funnel vs Customer Journey Map

When reading about a sales funnel strategy, you must’ve heard about the funnel stages such as Awareness, Interest, Consideration/Evaluation, Purchase, Post-purchase, and Re-purchase.

These stages are almost the same as we discussed in the customer journey map.

So, you might ask —

What’s the difference between a sales funnel and a customer journey map?

A sales funnel is a system created to increase sales by generating leads, nurturing them, and converting them into your customers. As the name suggests, the goal here is "sales".

On the other hand, a customer journey map is created to observe the customer’s entire experience with your brand, identify any areas of improvement, and fix them to enhance the customer experience. The goal here is to make the customer experience better.

GemPages — the page builder app for Shopify — has now got the new sales funnel feature. This feature allows you to create high-converting post-purchase upsell and downsell offers.

Graphical presentation of a sales funnel built with GemPages

GemPages Sales Funnels - The Ultimate Solution for Maximizing Your Shopify Store Profit

Mastering GemPages Sales Funnel Statistics: Key Metrics for Boosting Your Upsell Strategy  

[V7] Testing GemPages Sales Funnels Upsell with Shopify Orders

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map may vary for different business models. For example, the B2C vs B2B customer journey maps could be different.

However, this guide will focus on how to create a B2C customer journey map .

First things first — you need to start with the basics.

Before beginning the whole process, brainstorm on the scope of your customer journey map and prepare hypotheses. This will also help you align your goals with the overall scope.

Your brand may have more than one buyer persona, so think about — what specific buyer persona are you looking to target. Be specific about the goals you aim to accomplish through this practice. 

For example, your scope for the customer journey map could be different when your goal is to improve the customer experience than what it would be when your goal is to launch a new product line.

Defining the scope, writing down the hypotheses, and setting goals will give you a clear direction and systematic approach.

Based on the tenure of your brand, you may already have some level of data available to you. This data is crucial to gathering insights into your customers’ pain points as well as positive points.

These data points could be found through:

  • Customer service logs and reports
  • Social media monitoring
  • Net promoter score (NPS) data
  • Store reports and analytics
  • Google Analytics 4 data
  • Heatmap observations

All these data points will give you great insights into the real customer behavior and touchpoints throughout the journey.

Nothing can help you better perform buyer persona research than talking to your customers or gathering their direct feedback.

Here are some of the methods you can implement to do this:

  • Conduct 1-on-1 interviews with existing customers
  • Publish an online survey through email or social media
  • Ask for live feedback on the website

This is where you can gather data and observations for specific areas as per your scope for your buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character — created with data and research — that describes key traits of your ideal customer like gender, age, profession, location, income, goals, preferences, pain points, etc.

Here’s a Canva template that you can use to create your own buyer persona:

Buyer persona example

This is just a simple example to give you an idea of the key information; however, you may go into even more details as long as you have the information from real data and research.

Here’s an example of a detailed buyer persona shared by Single Grain :

An example of a detailed buyer persona

Based on all the data and insights you collected, prepare a buyer persona that is as precise and close as possible.

This buyer persona will help you bring your customer journey to life. For example, let’s say your buyer persona is a female professional who loves spending time on Instagram. This piece of information is also helpful to prepare your customer journey map.

Now, you’ll need to map  all the important factors that we discussed in the previous section:

  • Touchpoints
  • Thoughts & Emotions
  • Departments
  • Pain Points & Solutions

Also, throughout the journey, customers may interact with your brand through different channels. So, your touchpoints are not limited to just your website but also include other channels such as social media platforms, email, or even third-party customer review platforms.

All in all, you need to make sure that you cover all the possible touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

Ensure that your customer journey map is monitored and aligned with the scope and goals you defined in the beginning.

Identify the areas of improvement in the customer journey. For example, let’s say your sales team is receiving plenty of customer inquiries for a newly launched product; however, the conversion rate is poor. 

In that case, you may need to identify how to equip your sales team with a better unique selling point (USP) and value proposition .

In eCommerce, you must keep up with the ongoing trends and customer behavior. That’s why you must also update your customer journey map regularly.

For example, when you’re launching a new product or sales channel, you need to make sure your customer journey map is updated and relevant.

To simplify and speed up your process of creating a customer journey map, you can use a template. Here’s one of the best resources for various types of customer journey map templates:

HubSpot's 7 Free Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot’s customer journey map template

Alternatively, you can also use Canva’s Customer Journey Map Templates . Here’s one of the examples of a simple customer journey map template :

Canva’s customer journey map template

Benefits of Creating a Customer Journey Map

When you monitor the entire system from a customer’s standpoint, you can find areas that can be developed and enhanced.  Thus, overall, it lets you prepare a solid system and strategies.

When you visually map the customer journey and combine it with actions and emotions, it helps identify key areas of improvement. Also, you might come across new opportunities that were overlooked. For example, finding an opportunity for a new product launch.

As we discussed earlier, a customer journey map focuses on customers’ pain points, challenges, and emotions during the whole experience. Thus, it helps improve the processes for customers and streamline the buying journey for a better customer experience.

Customer retention can be improved, and thus, your brand can get repeat orders from your existing customers. As a result, you can also increase CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) too.

Start building your customer journey map with a data-driven approach.

Business decisions shouldn’t be based on assumptions. Even if you have certain expectations from the target market, you must validate them through data and feedback.

A well-prepared customer journey map will help you with all these aspects, and at the same time, it will also help customers to have a seamless brand and user experience.

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Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template

Online Shopping Customer Journey Map

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COMMENTS

  1. Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps 101 (2024)

    The ecommerce customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience of a customer from the initial interaction with a brand's online store to the final purchase. This includes browsing, product selection, checkout, and post-purchase support. Understanding and optimizing the ecommerce customer journey helps businesses enhance engagement and ...

  2. Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping [+ Tips & Template]

    Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping [ Tips & Template]

  3. How to create an ecommerce customer journey map (with examples)

    Make your maps as useful as possible by taking relevant information from a wide range of sources. 1. Website journey data. Google Analytics (GA) is an essential part of your ecommerce website analysis toolkit. Its reports and dashboards give you a high-level overview of how people use and move through your site.

  4. Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

    Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones ...

  5. e-Commerce Customer Journey Mapping

    Touchpoints: meeting a courier, signing delivery documentation. Here is what the backbone of the e-commerce customer journey map will look like. See a full-size image. In the same way, you can divide the purchasing process into "Review cart", "Checkout", "Payment", and other stages and analyze them in your map.

  6. How To Create a Customer Journey Map + Template

    3. Create customer personas. Customer personas, also known as buyer personas, are short, fictionalized profiles of your customers based on real data. To create a buyer persona for your journey map, you'll distill all the data you gathered in step two into one made-up individual.

  7. The Online Shopper Journey Explained: How to Create a Seamless ...

    But, as we've already discussed, you need to map out how you'll work with customers across the five stages of the customer journey. 3. Outline the Touchpoints. A touchpoint is any point of interaction between the customer and your brand, such as a website visit, an email, a social media post, or a phone call.

  8. Customer Journey Mapping in Ecommerce: Examples & Templates

    Pricing starts at $29/month per user. Touchpoint - Touchpoint is an intuitive web-based app for creating customer journey maps and analyzing customer behavior. It is built with collaboration in mind and is ideal for those retailers looking for a straightforward and scalable solution. Pricing is available on request.

  9. Ecommerce Customer Journey 101 + Map

    An ecommerce 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.

  10. E-commerce customer journey mapping [Free tool & guide]

    An example of a persona in an e-commerce customer journey map. Keep in mind that when you run an online shop, you should also examine potential customers or leads. 2. Define the scope of the e-commerce journey map . When creating a journey map, you can choose between various scales and scopes.

  11. The eCommerce customer journey and how to map it

    5 stages of the eCommerce customer journey. Your customers' overall journey can be broken down into five key stages. 01. Awareness. Your customer stumbles across your brand for the first time. Be it through an ad, social media, word of mouth, or SEO-they are now aware of your products.

  12. How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Your Online Store

    Let's put this into practice for building a customer journey map for an ecommerce business. For example, shoppers purchasing blue light-blocking glasses have the following touchpoints at each stage: Next, you'll add context around the thoughts and feelings the customer experiences at each stage in the buyer's journey.

  13. How to Create An eCommerce Customer Journey Map

    1. Choose an objective for the map. The first thing you need to do is to choose an objective. You can't create one customer map for all your customers because they have different goals for using your website. You need to choose an objective, which will help you determine each customer journey map's start and end goal.

  14. 25 inspiring customer journey maps to customize online

    Post-sales: the customer experience after a purchase has been made, including repeat purchases, customer loyalty, and post-sale customer support. 4. Pick out customer touchpoints. Following along with the journey you've begun mapping, it's time to work out where your touchpoints are, a.k.a. all the ways in which your brand encounters a ...

  15. Customer Journey Map: Everything You Need To Know

    Customer Journey Map: Everything You Need To Know

  16. E-commerce & In-Store Shopping Customer Journey Map Templates

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  17. Online Buying Customer Journey Map Template

    Customize, design, and edit the Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template to visualize your customer's online experience. With a clean layout and a teal, orange, and white color scheme, this template is perfect for e-commerce businesses and marketers. Highlight key phases, emotions, and expectations. Explore more mind maps templates on ...

  18. Online Shopping Customer Journey Map

    An Online Shopping Customer Journey Map visualizes the sequence of experiences a customer goes through when engaging with an e-commerce platform. It starts with the initial awareness or discovery phase, moves through consideration and decision-making as the customer browses products, and leads to purchase. The map continues beyond the sale to include post-purchase interactions such as customer ...

  19. PDF Online Shopping Customer Journey Map

    Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Searches for Websites Wants to buy a Christmas gift for a friend Clicks the 1st ads. result. Checks online again and go to the 1st. original result Searches products keywords on search engines Checks out ongoing deals and hot sale products 80 % Opens a product

  20. 5 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Customer Journey

    Acquisition. Retention. Advocacy. But in the spirit of customer centricity, we're choosing to rename the stages of the customer journey to put ourselves in the customers' shoes. Here's quick a visualization of five stages in the ecommerce customer journey, and what each means for your customers: Five stages of the ecommerce customer ...

  21. Online Shopping Journey Map

    The online shopping customer journey map template below illustrates the general process of user experience in ordering online from any eCommerce platform like Amazon, Walmart, or personal eCommerce sites. The below online shopping customer journey map offers customers an efficient way to engage with their brands. You can fully edit the following template using free customer journey map diagram ...

  22. How to Create a Customer Journey Map + Templates [2024]

    Build & customize branded stores Customize any Shopify themes for pixel-perfect store design Build high-converting landing page Customize Shopify theme for conversion design X2 conversion with customized product pages Build, test different product pages for different audiences fast Warm up cold leads with pre-sale funnel Hook prospects with advertorial pages featuring star products Drive ...

  23. Online Shopping Customer Journey Map Template

    The online shopping customer journey map template illustrates the general process of user experience in ordering online. It offers customers an efficient way to engage with their brands. It offers customers an efficient way to engage with their brands.