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Best ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey

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Adam Wilson
Best ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey

Every one of us had a customer journey in some way or the other. As a customer, we see things, evaluate them and then make a purchase. Now, as a marketer, you must have seen the customer journey in digital marketing. Many prospective customers come to your website and sometimes leave without even making a purchase. 

This might leave you with many questions like:

  • Didn’t they find the product they were looking for?
  • What prevented the buyer from making a purchase?
  • Was the cost too high?

In this blog, we will give you easy ways to find answers to all of your ecommerce discovery questions. First, we’ll start by understanding an ecommerce customer journey. 


What is an ecommerce customer journey?

consumer journey in digital marketing


An ecommerce customer journey refers to the consumer journey stages through which a buyer goes through with an online business. The path to purchase journey is divided into many stages, from awareness to the final decision stage. 

A good customer experience can have a positive impact on your prospects in many ways, for instance:

  • If your website loads quickly & has a user-friendly interface, offers clear & cost-effective prices, is easier to navigate, and customer support is readily available, then most of the prospects will prefer to buy from you. 
  • If your site is slow to load and doesn’t respond quickly, then this might piss off the customers. Also, the higher pricing and too many pop-ups can lead them to exit your web page. 

Why is an ecommerce customer journey important? 

Usually, customers tend to have many opinions about online businesses based on their interactions. By breaking down these engagements and interactions into different stages, you can understand the ecommerce customer journey better. 


Below, we have explained the different stages of the ecommerce customer journey. 


Related: Best Customer Journey Mapping Tools


5 Stages of the customer purchase journey

ecommerce customer journey

The concept of the ecommerce customer journey has been there for a long. People usually aren’t aware that they enter the online buying process once they visit a website.

The customer journey begins from the moment a prospect engages with a website. The consumer journey has the following stages:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Retention
  • Advocacy


Here, we will explain all these stages in detail so you can comprehend the customer journey better. 


Stage 1: Discovery

The customer comes across your business for the first time. 

This stage is also called as awareness stage, where the customer gets to know that your business exists. In this stage, you can find out where your maximum customers are coming from. You can discover the pages they are landing on and how they are navigating your website.

Gathering this information can help you know what your prospective customers need and what they look for on your website.


Stage 2: Interest 

The customer finds something interesting and starts browsing your website. 

This is the stage where you can focus on reducing the bounce rates of your web pages and making more people interested. You can find out how you can help customers to navigate better and list the best products which intrigue them to click.


Stage 3: Intent 

The customer adds the items to the wishlist but doesn’t make the purchase. They are still considering their purchase.

At this stage, you should discover the page features that make the prospects add the products to the wishlist or cart. So when you are considering the layout of the product pages, you can design them accordingly. You can also consider adding other marketing channels in this stage to have a greater influence, such as email or intent marketing. 


Stage 4: Purchase 

The customer decides to make the final purchase. 

This stage is also called as the decision-making or conversion stage. This is the stage where the prospect becomes a paying customer. However, once a prospect becomes your customer, that’s not the end of your task. You should see how you can improve their experience to build long-term relationships. You can also conduct post-purchase surveys or take feedback to know from your customers directly.


Stage 5: Engagement 

If a customer like your product or service, they will continue to purchase and engage with your business further. 

You can try and engage with your new customers by asking them to subscribe to your email list or newsletter. You can also utilize social media to interact with them and share information blogs. Marketers should make sure that they don’t lose touch with their prospects once they become customers. Moreover, retaining existing customers is easier than getting new ones in the marketing funnel.


4 simple ways to improve your ecommerce customer journey

In this section, we will tell you how you can enhance your ecommerce customer journey in easy ways. 

You can start by using Google Analytics to know your website insights such as pageviews, bounce & exit rates, the average time people spend on your website, etc. 


ecommerce journey


With quantitative data from GA, you can identify the UX issues and make changes accordingly. GA can help you collect a lot of data, but you can’t exactly know how your customers see your site or experience it. To understand your prospective customers better, it’s important to analyze your customers behavior. Therefore, it is essential that you gather qualitative data.

WebMaxy is an all-in-one tool that offers accurate and detailed customer behavior insights. It provides various features like session recordings, heatmaps, on-page surveys, polls, and funnel analytics. You can use WebMaxy to carry out different actions to understand your prospects better. Below, we have given 4 ways utilizing which you can improve your ecommerce customer journey.


Related: Steps to Create a Customer Journey Map


1. On-site survey to know more about the ‘discovery’ stage

By executing surveys on your high-traffic pages, such as the home page or category page, you can learn more about the initial stage of your customer journey. You can track where your customers come from and what makes them land on your website.

Consider asking different questions to your website visitors in your on-page surveys, such as

  • From where did you hear about us?
  • What exactly are you looking for today?
  • What made you come here?

2. Use heatmaps to know the interest areas of your visitors 

You can use WebMaxy heatmaps to know how your website visitors interact and engage with the different elements of your website. Marketers can understand and identify the patterns of customers behavior. They can know which areas prospects click on and how they navigate through the site. In heatmaps, you can see the areas where the visitors have clicked the most with red and the least clicked areas with blue. 



user behavior analytics tool


The scroll maps can help you know the areas till where people have scrolled on a page. The bright area indicates the area that has been scrolled more. 


ecommerce website


With heatmaps, you can discover a lot of insights and make changes like:

  • Add new navigation options or refine the website design.
  • See where the customers are clicking and add CTAs accordingly. 
  • Discover the areas that interest the visitors the most.

For your ecommerce website, you can use heatmaps before and after the website redesign. This will aid you in knowing if your website alterations are working for you or not. You can put heatmaps on your main pages to know the factors that lead to bounce rates and improve the conversion rate. 

Heatmap analysis can help you find out detailed information, such as,

  • If the prospects are clicking on the key elements?
  • Are customers viewing the important details?
  • Are website visitors facing any issues with the website?


3. On-page surveys to improve the intent stage 

If you think that surveys are just for the discovery stage, then you are mistaken. You can use surveys at different stages of the ecommerce customer journey to identify the areas of improvement. 

To enhance your intent stage, you can ask open-ended questions to your website visitors like:

  • What information is missing on this page?
  • What do you think we need to change about our website or page?
  • Why are you leaving before purchasing?
  • How can we make your buying decision easier?

WebMaxy survey feature can aid you in conducting several types of surveys on your website with ease. It offers a wide range of templates with well-researched questions that you can utilize directly.


customer behavior


4. Post-purchase surveys to know your customers’ satisfaction level 

The customer journey usually doesn’t end after a purchase. If they like a product or service, they do come back. You can send a post-purchase survey to your customers to know if they liked your products or services. This will help you to know how their ecommerce customer journey was with you. You can ask several questions in the survey like:


  • How would you rate your experience with us?
  • Did you like our product/service?
  • How would you rate our product or service on a scale of 1-10?
  • Will you make a purchase from us again?
  • Would you recommend our product/service to your friends or family?



Knowing these answers will aid you in making strategic changes and improve your ecommerce customer journey. 


Wrapping Up 

The primary goal of an ecommerce website is to capture the customers’ attention and lead them to purchase. Therefore, it’s essential to make your prospects’ ecommerce customer journey seamless and trouble-free. By analyzing your customers behavior and preferences, you can make value-driven decisions. WebMaxy Analyzer is a user behavior analytics tool that provides an in-depth analysis of your website visitors. 

It has various features such as session recordings, heatmaps, surveys & polls, and user insights. Schedule a call with our experts to learn more about WebMaxy Analyzer, or email us at sales@webmaxy.com


user behavior analytics tools


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