The ecommerce customer journey doesn’t start when someone arrives at your website, and it doesn’t end when they buy your products or services. In fact, it can begin long before they ever visit your site and continue through the delivery and returns process, and into subsequent orders from the same customer.

Today, the ecommerce customer journey is no longer linear. Modern consumers move between search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces, AI assistants, review platforms, and image search tools before making a buying decision. Discovering a product on TikTok, reading online reviews, identifying similar items with Google Lens, or previewing clothes using virtual try-on tools are all parts of today’s customer journey.

Ideally, this journey may eventually lead to your website. But the reality is, ecommerce brands can no longer optimise for a single channel or rely solely on traditional conversion funnels.

To maximise revenue and customer retention, your brand must understand how discovery, research, trust, and purchase decisions unfold across multiple touchpoints. This includes positive brand perception and awareness, as well as simple returns policies and after-sales support.

What is an ecommerce customer journey?

An ecommerce customer journey is the complete experience a consumer has with a brand. This starts with initial awareness (when they first discover the brand) and continues through purchase, after-sales support, and anything that leads to them becoming a returning customer. 

There are lots of potential ecommerce customer journey touchpoints – from awareness via social media to receiving a newsletter after buying from a brand. Each ecommerce customer journey can differ, but mapping it helps businesses identify pain points and ways to maximise each step to improve the chance of conversions.

The modern multimodal ecommerce journey

Ecommerce discovery is becoming increasingly multimodal, as consumers no longer just find brands by typing keywords into search engines. Instead, they combine text, image, and voice searches to discover and learn more about brands with AI-generated recommendations, social discovery, and visual search tools.

For example, a potential customer might upload a photo of a pair of sunglasses into Google Lens to find a similar product, ask ChatGPT for “the best men’s sunglasses under £150”, or use a virtual try-on experience before purchasing eyewear.

This changes how brands should think about maximising ecommerce customer journey touchpoints. Brands that optimise only for traditional keyword rankings risk losing visibility in newer discovery ecosystems, as visibility now depends on:

  • Structured product data
  • High-quality imagery
  • Entity recognition
  • Creator visibility
  • Marketplace presence
  • Review signals
  • AI-readable content
  • Omnichannel consistency.

Landmark levels along the customer journey

Broadly speaking, the customer journey can be broken down into five landmark levels or significant stages:

  1. Brand or product awareness and arrival on your website.
  2. Browsing your ecommerce site and choosing to purchase.
  3. Checkout, delivery, and immediate problems (e.g. broken/wrong item/wrong size).
  4. After-sales service and support (e.g. returns, replacement, refunds).
  5. Customer loyalty, user reviews, newsletter signups, and reorders.

At each stage, there are many ways to interact with the customer. These include your initial marketing efforts, SEO, PPC ads, and newsletters, through to your website or app, ecommerce platform, delivery fulfilment, and the ways you keep in touch after checkout.

Not all interactions may start positively – you could receive a customer complaint or a negative review on social media. By responding constructively, you can often resolve a negative situation, retain the customer, and even gain a new brand ambassador.

How to improve the ecommerce user journey

Here’s how to optimise the modern ecommerce customer journey to improve visibility, conversions, customer satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

Have high-quality images to maximise visual search

Visual search is becoming a major part of ecommerce discovery. It’s particularly important for fashion, beauty, home décor, furniture, and even automotive retailers.

Tools like Google Lens allow users to:

  • Identify products from photos
  • Compare visually similar items
  • Discover retailers and ecommerce brands
  • Find alternative styles.

Brand visibility extends beyond owned websites as visual discovery is heavily influenced by user-generated content and social media imagery. There are a few things you can do to optimise your ecommerce brand for visual search:

  • Use high-resolution original imagery of your products 
  • Include multiple product images and angles 
  • Apply descriptive alt text to all images
  • Optimise image filenames
  • Use structured product schema
  • Maintain consistent product feeds
  • Enable merchant centre integrations.

Enhance product images for virtual try-on technology

High-quality images that AI tools can comprehend and integrate into their systems are also vital for virtual try-on technology (VTO). VTO is reshaping ecommerce experiences by helping customers evaluate products before purchasing.

Consumers can use the likes of Google Doppl and AI-generated outfit visualisation to preview:

  • Clothing fit
  • Makeup shades
  • Eyewear styles
  • Footwear
  • Furniture placement.

This helps reduce uncertainty during the consideration stage, which can strengthen purchase confidence, improve conversion rates, and reduce return rates. For ecommerce brands, immersive commerce is becoming a competitive advantage rather than an experimental feature.

Improve ecommerce AI visibility

AI-powered assistants are an evolving discovery channel and touchpoint that’s rapidly changing how consumers research products and brands. They reduce the number of websites users visit before making a purchase decision.

Instead of browsing dozens of websites manually, consumers simply ask AI tools for product recommendations, comparisons, buying advice, review summaries, styling suggestions, and gift ideas.

To make the most of this relatively new channel, it’s important to review how your products appear across AI overviews, ChatGPT shopping recommendations, and Perplexity citations. To be surfaced by AI tools, ecommerce brands need content that’s entity-rich, trustworthy (supported by reviews and third-party validation), and easy for AI systems to interpret.

Optimise omnichannel ecommerce

Consumers rarely move directly from discovery to purchase. Instead, they usually conduct research across multiple platforms and communities. This can include seeking reviews on Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Amazon reviews, and Trustpilot.

To account for this, brands must optimise their wider digital footprint beyond just their ecommerce platform. Social proof, review sentiment, consistent product data, community engagement, and third-party mentions help boost ecommerce visibility across multiple channels.

The ecommerce customer journey isn’t limited to online interactions either. Make sure you maintain the same high standards across other channels, including departments whose main area of expertise isn’t customer service. For example, accounts and legal, and delivery companies that represent you in person when transporting goods to customers.

As your operations grow in complexity, it becomes more difficult to track performance across your channels, especially to understand how they interact.

A customer journey map is a good way to make sense of the end-to-end process. It breaks down customer interactions into time frames based on the landmark stages mentioned above, or sensible equivalents for your business.

Set goals and reports

For each step in your customer cycle, set goals for your business, and understand the customer’s aims too. For example:

Stage Customer Goal Business Goal
Marketing Find products and stay informed Mailing list opt-in and social media follows
Conversion Buy useful and beautiful products and services Maximise order size and complete checkout
Aftersales Troubleshoot problems and buy add-ons/accessories Maximise positive reviews and follow-up sales

Your customer journey map can be much more complex than this, and not every customer will interact with every stage.

For example, some customers might arrive directly at your website after hearing about you through positive word of mouth, rather than finding you through a search engine or on social media.

Equally, you might hope that a customer doesn’t need after-sales support due to a product fault or other problem, but might choose to buy accessories and add-ons for a product they enjoy.

Review your customer journey map

Ecommerce lends itself to tracking performance via analytics and sales reports. This means you have a continual stream of data to use to review your customer map and make any appropriate changes.

For example, you might find customers usually shop your website by category, rather than by specific brand names. Or you might discover that your biggest orders come from customers ordering bundles and accessories, rather than several non-related products.

Such information can be crucial as you seek to produce marketing materials that cater to customers’ needs and wants and create product pages that make the most of upsell opportunities to increase basket sizes.

Focus on the customer journey after purchase

The ecommerce journey doesn’t end at checkout. Post-purchase experiences play a major role in customer retention, reviews, referrals, and social sharing.

To maximise after-sales, ecommerce brands should optimise:

  • Delivery communication 
  • Onboarding emails 
  • Loyalty programmes 
  • UGC campaigns 
  • Personalised recommendations 

Positive post-purchase experiences often feed directly back into discovery channels through reviews and social content. This aligns with modern retention-led ecommerce thinking.

Mapping the customer journey to your ecommerce site

Website analytics can provide both aggregate and individual data about customer behaviour. Use this to your advantage. 

For example, look at specific landing pages to see the percentage of customers who arrive via that page who go on to make a purchase – and how much they spend on average.

Look for pages with high bounce rates, high exit rates, or where customers spend a long time without buying anything. Consider whether you could do anything to improve the content on those pages.

Optimisation is a combination of publishing new content and improving what you already have. A customer-led approach can be effective even on mature ecommerce sites to identify poorly performing pages and bring them up to standard.

Tap into top conversion paths

Your website analytics data can identify your top conversion paths – reliable routes from a landing page through to checkout.

Capitalise on these by publishing new content that offers a similar path to placing an order, or running special offers and discount codes on your social media channels to bring more traffic in via those top-performing landing pages.

Optimisation is a combination of multiple factors. You can maximise the customer journey – and increase ecommerce sales – by:

  • Increasing traffic to pages that perform well on conversion rate and basket size.
  • Optimising lower-performing pages to improve their analytics.
  • Creating new pages and categories to tap into new sales opportunities.

Combining good, bad, old and new content in this way covers all the different paths to generate additional sales and revenue, either from your current website traffic or by increasing the number of visitors you receive.

What matters most for your ecommerce user journey?

Your customer journey map can help you learn what matters most in your ecommerce marketing:

  • Positive brand perception for word-of-mouth referrals.
  • Active and engaging content for social media presence.
  • Optimised keyword bids if you rely heavily on PPC traffic.

By prioritising the most important channels and content, and exploring other opportunities for expansion and sales generation, you can make sure you give your customers what they want from your brand, while maximising revenues at the same time.

Find out how our ecommerce SEO services can help enhance your brand’s online presence and maximise touchpoints from start to finish. Contact us today to discuss your project.