4 practical ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey (with examples from MADE.com)

Table of contents

• What is the ecommerce customer journey?

• • Why is the ecommerce customer journey important?

  • 5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey

• 4 ways to learn about the ecommerce journey from your customers

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

  • 2. Use heatmaps to visualize the ‘Interest/intent’ stage

  • 3. Use on-page surveys to improve the ‘Intent’ and ‘purchase’ stage

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

Let’s start from the basics:

What is the ecommerce customer journey?

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

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

• If your website loads quickly and without issues, offers and prices are clear, pages are easy to navigate, and customer support teams are easy to reach, your website visitors might feel comfortable with making a purchase

• If your website is slow to load, unexpected costs pop up, the product page is hard to navigate, or there are too many 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 times.

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:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• 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:

And here’s how each stage relates to your 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.”)

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

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.”)

Online businesses may be able to identify which page features are working to your advantage and what is 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!”)

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

Now that we’ve covered the basics of the customer journey, let’s get back to our initial point and show you how YOU can improve a customer’s experience on your ecommerce site.

4 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 data (or another traditional analytics tool): for example, you can gain insight on unique pageviews, the average time people are spending on each page, bounce rates, exit rates, and even how customers are using your site’s “search” bar.

However, there will come a point where data from GA isn’t enough for you to understand exactly what’s going on (or why), which is what Spencer at MADE.com experienced when using Google Analytics. He used what he learned from GA to develop ideas about MADE.com’s 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 had 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 3 tools he used and 4 actions he took:

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

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

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

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

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 stage of the customer journey, and understand what brought people to your website or to a specific sub-section of it.

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

If this was your ecom website → a survey like this one would help you get a better sense of which channel(s) your visitors found you from. Remember that Google Analytics will report on the difference between paid or organic traffic, but it will not be able to account for sources such as word of mouth, friend referral, or physical advertising.

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 HOMEPAGE AT MADE.COM AS OF JANUARY 2020

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. Heatmaps 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 is particularly crucial in the interest stage, where people may be in a browsing mood and are looking for inspiration.

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

THE ‘HOT’ PLACES WITH THE MOST INTERACTION ARE RENDERED IN RED

If this was your ecom website → you could use heatmaps before and after a page or website redesign to evaluate if changes you make to structure and layout influence visitor behavior. You can also use heatmaps on critical ecommerce pages (such as product or basket pages), especially when you’re focusing efforts on reducing bounce rates and getting more people to convert and want to answer questions such as:

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

• Are prospective customers seeing all the important information?

• Are people experiencing issues across devices?

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 had been 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?”:

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 such as:

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

• What is your biggest fear or concern about purchasing this item?

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

• If you are not making a purchase today, what is stopping you?

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.

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 purchase or a repeat order.

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 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?

Final thought

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