The ecommerce customer experience defines a customer's interactions with a brand while shopping online. This includes the ease of website navigation, functionality of product search, ease of checkout, quality of customer service, and post-purchase follow-up.
While most of these events take place online through on-site, multichannel and omnichannel buying experiences, they can also apply to post-purchase experiences both online and offline, including:
- Customer retention campaigns
- Unboxing experiences
- Customer support
- Pop-up shops and live retail events
- Product experiences themselves
With so many touchpoints that make or break a consumer’s experience with your brand, combined with the fact that 78% of customers expect more personalization in interactions than ever before, the real question is: How can you offer a world-class shopping experience at scale? This guide shares a 22-point checklist to help you optimize the ecommerce customer experience.
Understand customer needs and behavior
1. Collect customer data and insights
You’ll have a hard time delivering excellent customer service if you don’t know who you’re serving. Customer data, whether first-party (like on-site behavioral data collected by Shopify) or zero-party (like quiz results and customer feedback), highlights your customers’ needs and preferences. You can use this information to fine-tune the experiences on offer.
Jones Road Beauty, for example, has a “Find My Shade” quiz that helps shoppers overcome a common issue when shopping for cosmetics online: finding the right shade. It asks people to:
- Choose the model with the skin tone most similar to their own
- Share their concerns (e.g. redness or uneven skin tone)
- Describe how they’d like to use the product
- Share their skin type and age
- Enter their email address to receive the shade recommendation
The quiz is a win-win: The customer gets the personalized product recommendations they’re looking for, and even if they don’t end up buying the recommended items, Jones Road Beauty can lean on the gathered data gathered to retarget potential customers via email.
2. Analyze customer journey maps
A customer journey map is a visual representation of how customers engage with your brand across every channel. It tells you how long people tend to spend in each stage of the conversion funnel, their purchase motivations and goals at each stage, and their preferred channel.
If you build out your own customer journey map to identify customers' needs and expectations, your ecommerce customer experience strategy can anticipate and ease any concerns before they crop up.
The map isn’t just a smart technique to improve the ecommerce customer experience—it’s a competitive advantage. A HubSpot report found that just a quarter of CRM leaders have full visibility into their customer’ journey.
3. Identify pain points and opportunities
Maximize growth by prioritizing areas for improvement in the customer experience, as opposed to launching new initiatives from scratch. The biggest wins are often small tweaks suggested by your customers.
Get into the habit of collecting customer feedback and analyzing it to identify opportunities. Gather initial data through:
- Focus group
- Review sites
- Live chat tools like Shopify Inbox
- Social media listening tools that detect brand sentiment
- Post-purchase feedback surveys within order confirmation emails and winback campaigns
Concerns that arise most frequently—particularly from loyal or high-value customers—should take priority throughout this process. If loyal customers express dissatisfaction with the ease of initiating returns, for example, analyze your current return flow and experiment with free returns for VIP customers. Repeat customers spend the most money with your brand, so it makes sense to take their feedback on board first.
Meet customer expectations
4. Define and manage customer expectations
We experience an upsetting disconnect when our expectations go unmet. In an ecommerce context: you might be offering what you think is world-class support and service, but if customers expect more from you, or you don’t deliver on an initial promise, they’ll still be disappointed.
The key is to set clear expectations from the outset, particular as they relate to:
- Product availability (i.e. if something’s out of stock and is on pre-order, make this clear)
- Order processing times
- Shipping cost and time estimates
- Response times
EasyStandard leans on Shop Promise to communicate delivery timelines to customers before they buy. Before placing an order, shoppers know exactly how long it’ll take to arrive, which helps to reduce “Where is my order?” support tickets that dampen the ecommerce customer experience. Thanks to Shopify Fulfillment Network, EasyStandard manages to deliver on these expectations 93% of the time.
Clear expectations also create an opportunity to unexpectedly delight customers when you surpass them. If you promise two-day shipping and a customer’s order arrives the next day, for example, their expectations are exceeded—the opposite of a negative ecommerce customer experience.
5. Create a unique selling proposition
Why should customers choose your product over a competitor’s? Clearly stating your unique value proposition assists the decision-making process. Shoppers know exactly how your brand differs from others on the market, and why they should opt for yours.
YETI’s cooling boxes, for example, are known for their insulation power and durability. Shoppers who consider these elements important have a clear reason to choose the brand’s cooling boxes over others—especially those who neglect to mention these elements in their own marketing materials.
6. Build audience trust
Trust is one thing that every purchase decision hinges upon. Baymard found that one-fourth of all carts are abandoned because customers didn’t trust the site with their personal information. It’s no surprise when retailers require sensitive data like a customer’s full name, shipping address, and credit card number to process a transaction—shoppers need to know this information is in safe hands.
Build trust with potential customers through transparency and clear communication. This ties back to the importance of setting expectations: It’s easier to trust someone when they deliver on their promises.
Other ways to build trust amongst your audience include:
- Detailed product descriptions that share accurate material and sizing information
- Sharing unbiased reviews or endorsements, such as user-generated content
- Displaying trust signals like 5-star ratings or money-back guarantees
- Personalizing your “About Us” page
- Making shipping, returns, T&Cs, and privacy policies easily accessible
Design a customer-centric ecommerce platform
7. Offer a user-friendly website design and navigation
Picture this: You’ve landed on a new retailer’s website for the first time. You have a product in mind, but you can’t find it. The site’s navigation menu is difficult to use; there’s no search function to point you in the right direction. What happens next? You’ll probably move on.
Your ecommerce store needs to be user-friendly with clear navigation and an easy-to-use interface—not just on desktop, but mobile too. It’s estimated that the mobile ecommerce market will account for 63% of all online sales by 2028.
Customer feedback is the quickest way to identify bottlenecks in your site’s user experience. Integrating a pop-up form that asks: “Did you find what you’re looking for today?” can pinpoint navigational friction that you can eliminate by creating a new category, restructuring your ecommerce navigation, or offering advanced search functionality.
Beauty retailer ILIA put this into practice when migrating to Shopify, using the headless ecommerce solution to deliver better shopping experiences with “find my shade” and “compare shades” functionality. As a direct result of these tools, ILIA saw a 18% reduction in exit rate and a 10% improvement in bound rate.
“Moving to a headless solution has brought a new way of thinking in terms of content modeling and figuring out all the different content types we can leverage,” says ILIA’s Vice President of Digital, Albert Chong. “In the long term, it's really going to bring more organizational performance, and more streamlined ways of thinking about how to enhance our customers’ shopping experience.
8. Ensure an omnichannel presence and integration
An omnichannel presence meets customers where they are, delivering personalized and seamless customer experiences on the channels they’re already using. This can be accomplished by integrating sales channels into a single ecommerce platform.
Shopify, for example, can pool inventory and sales data from your:
- Online storefront
- Point-of-sale (POS) system
- Mobile shopping apps like Shop
- Marketplace listings
- Social media storefronts (e.g. Facebook and Instagram Shops)
Jewelry retailer Astrid & Miyu enlisted the help of Shopify’s omnichannel functionality to revolutionize customers’ shopping experiences. With both online and brick-and-mortar retail stores, it uses Shopify POS to gather data on offline sales and mesh it with data collected from its ecommerce site.
Astrid & Miyu now process over a million orders through its online and offline sales channels, and has experienced a 5x increase in customers who place more than four orders when shopping omnichannel. These shoppers have a 40% higher lifetime value over those who shop online only, reinforcing the value of building out customer profiles with data collected from every interaction.
Deliver exceptional customer support
9. Deliver multichannel support and communication
Customers aren’t just shopping on different channels—they’re requesting assistance on them too. Phone, email, live chat, and social media messages are all common points of contact when customers need help. Omnichannel customer service meets these shoppers where they are, as opposed to funneling them toward a communication channel they’re unfamiliar with.
Omnichannel customer service software like Zendesk and Gorgias integrates with Shopify to help you centralize support tickets. Instead of hopping from channel to channel and requesting the same information each time, the software lets you send messages from a single platform and view every interaction you’ve had with a particular customer.
10. Offer proactive and responsive engagement
Some 82% of customers expect immediate problem resolution from customer service agents—but there’s a clear disconnect between what customers expect and the experiences that ecommerce brands offer. Per Gorgias, the average first response time is 11.4 hours, with a typical resolution time of 18.1 hours.
Proactive support flips the script by anticipating what a customer might need and making the first move—before they have to contact support and wait for a response.
The secret to fast support is twofold: First, developing a customer support team that is knowledgeable and responsive; second, using customer data to anticipate what a customer needs—and when. Chatbots assist with both: They can handle answers to FAQs, providing your customers with immediate responses and freeing up your agent’s time to handle tickets that need a human touch.
11. Consider self-service options and automation
Not every customer wants to chat with your support team when they need assistance. According to HubSpot, 78% of CRM leaders believe customers prefer to solve issues independently.
Offer self-service documentation to empower customers to find their own (immediate) solutions to common problems. Beard & Blade does this with an FAQ page that answers delivery, pick-up, payment, and return-related questions.
Configure marketing automations to signpost customers to this documentation when required. For example, if you sell home office equipment and know shoppers struggle to configure a particular chair ergonomically, send an automated email on the day of delivery that links them to a setup guide specific to the chair they’ve bought.
12. Aim for service recovery
Service recovery is a customer support strategy that aims to turn negative experiences into positive ones. It plays on the customer service recovery paradox: the idea that customers might become more loyal if you recover from a blunder, rather than giving them an entirely hitch-free experience.
What a resolution looks like can depend on the customer complaint you’re handling. It could be something like:
- Issuing a free replacement for an item that arrived faulty or damaged
- Offering free expedited shipping on a customer’s next order if their first order arrived late
- Issuing a returnless refund for a low-cost product that a valued customer wants to return
Optimize the buying process
13. Streamline checkout and payment options
The checkout experience can make or break a user’s experience with your brand. A checkout that’s secure, easy to use, offers the customer’s preferred payment method, and is quick to complete is much more likely to retain potential customers and prevent cart abandonment.
Everlane enlists the help of Shop Pay to offer a blazing-fast checkout experience. The retailer moved away from a self-built ecommerce platform with limited customization to a checkout experience that’s been optimized by years of experimentation and iteration.
“We didn’t want our customers to continue having to enter their address or credit card information, or spend time making an account,” says Everlane’s product lead, Anna M. Peterson. “Most people want to avoid signing up and giving you their password. We wanted to make it seamless and easy for them to purchase quickly.”
Within just 30 days of integrating Shop Pay, 15% of all transactions were processed through the streamlined checkout. Shopify’s internal measurement of Everlane’s performance shows conversion rates of up to 70%.
14. Improve delivery times and fulfillment options
Customers define “fast shipping” as just over three days. But Amazon’s foray into next- and same-day delivery means these expectations will only become more demanding as time goes on.
Your fulfillment and delivery strategy must meet those expectations if you intend to offer a competitive, positive customer experience. That means prioritizing speed and accuracy at every step in the order fulfillment process, including:
- Relying on warehouse technology to pick orders
- Generating shipping labels (discounted with Shopify Shipping)
- Choosing carriers that guarantee delivery
Shopify Fulfillment Network can help you meet shipping expectations without adding extra pressure to your logistics team byl connecting your store with Flexport, a leading logistics company that will manage the entire order fulfillment process for you.
15. Simplify returns and exchanges
Returns are an inevitable part of operating an ecommerce business, and it’s important to put some thought into how you handle them . One report found that 85% of online shoppers wouldn’t shop with a retailer again after a negative returns experience.
A positive ecommerce returns experience involves:
- Offering a range of return options, including cash refunds, like-for-like exchanges, or store credit
- Being fair with your returns window and qualifying criteria
- Catering to a range of omnichannel return methods (e.g. accepting a return in-store for an item bought online)
- Processing returns quickly by having customers ship packages back to their nearest warehouse
- Catering to climate-concerned shoppers by allowing them to print return labels at home instead of wasting paper by printing one for every order
Leverage technology to offer an exceptional customer experience
16. Lean on artificial intelligence and chatbots
Artificial intelligence has the power to analyze previous conversations, the customer’s support history, and your store policies to craft immediate responses to an incoming query.
It’s a smart way to serve more customers at scale—so much so, data compiled in HubSpot’s report shows 71% of CRM leaders plan to increase their AI investment in the coming year, with 77% estimating AI technology will handle most ticket resolutions by 2025.
Shopify Inbox has this functionality baked in. It uses Shopify’s generative AI feature, Magic, to suggest personalized FAQs based on ticket history, which you can then configure as instant answers in your live chat tool.
17. Offer augmented reality and virtual experiences
Augmented reality is becoming more common in the online shopping experience. The technology allows customers to virtually try on products in the comfort of their own home using an AR headset or mobile device.
Magnolia Market, for example, wanted to replicate the in-store experience of its flagship store in Waco for online shoppers. The home furnishings retailer worked with Shopify to produce an AR app, which website visitors can use by visiting a product page and holding up their device to see a life-sized version of that product in their own home.
As well as replicating the personalized in-store experience, Magnolia Market’s AR app may help reduce returns by letting customers see what the product looks like and how it’ll fit their home before placing an order.
18. Consider inventory management and supply chain optimization
“Out of stock” is a message you never want customers to see. Stockouts cost retailers a collective $350 billion each year. They impact the ecommerce experience when people can’t buy the product they’re interested in—likely forcing them to buy from a competitor instead.
Inventory management and supply chain optimization reduces the risk of stockouts. An automated inventory management system, for example, can monitor inventory levels across all storage locations—private warehouses, retail stores, and third-party logistics providers’ storage facilities included. Use one to track sales, anticipate demand, and automatically draft purchase orders when inventory falls below a specified threshold.
Supply chain optimization also allows you to improve delivery times and offer alternative fulfillment options. The more efficiently you can pick, pack, and ship orders, the more likely you are to meet—or beat—a customer’s delivery expectations.
Build customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is a natural byproduct of a positive ecommerce experience, but you can’t assume that people will become repeat customers after one initial purchase. You must put effort into engaging these existing customers if you’re to stand any chance of securing repeat business.
Take 707 Street: The apparel brand previously sold products through an Amazon storefront, but quickly realized that there was no way for customers to interact directly with the brand. What it needed was a scalable, customizable website that reflected its values while maintaining a direct line of communication with its customers. Enter: Shopify.
707 Street upgraded to Shopify and enlisted the help of UpPromote to create a referral and affiliate program that could pay customers for sales attributable to their referrals, fostering customer advocacy and word-of-mouth business.
The apparel retailer also made significant improvements to the post-purchase experience in a bid to build customer loyalty, like installing the following Shopify apps:
- Rebuy to improve AOV by suggesting additional products that a customer would most likely be interested in
- Smile to create a loyalty program that rewards customers with points on every purchase
- Tapcart to build a mobile shopping app and send push notifications about upcoming product launches
“Shopify makes everything easy—from customizing our pages to integrating with our mobile app to securely processing payments—which has enabled our team to keep focused on growing the business,” says 707 Street founder David Koh. “With Shopify Plus, we’re finding more ways to better serve our customers than ever before, and our growth has continued to accelerate.”
Measure the ecommerce customer experience
Much like any other ecommerce or business strategy, the only way to know whether you’re delivering a seamless customer experience is to monitor how people respond to it.
Important metrics to lean on when reviewing your ecommerce customer experience strategy include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): The percentage of customers who are satisfied with your product or brand experience. If you have 1,000 customer reviews and 860 of them are positive, for example, your CSAT score would be 86%. This metric should trend upward as you make improvements to the ecommerce experience.
- Net promoter score (NPS): This metric measures how likely your customers are to recommend your products. Ask this question in your customer feedback surveys to calculate yours: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): Positive ecommerce experiences increase the odds of repeat purchases. Measure this metric for your business by tracking how a customer’s lifetime value changes.
- First contact resolution: The percentage of support tickets that are resolved in the customer’s first interaction with your customer service team. The higher this figure is, the better—customers don’t have to reiterate their issue multiple times when it’s solved right away.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of website traffic that converts into paying customers. It’s an important metric to track if you’re running A/B tests to make changes to your site with the aim of generating more revenue, like integrating AR apps or rewriting product descriptions.
Overcoming challenges in ecommerce CX
19. Monitor site health and performance
Online shoppers aren’t willing to wait around for a web page to load. Bounce rate almost triples if a site takes longer than three seconds to load, and conversion rates increase with every millisecond improvement in site speed.
To meet these blazing-fast shopping expectations, measure your current website performance with Site Speed Audit. The free Shopify tool will benchmark your site speed against other retailers in your niche and of a similar size, providing personalized recommendations on how to improve site speed and retain more website traffic.
Dermalogica chose Shopify for its website performance and site speed capabilities. Within a month after migrating from Salesforce, the beauty brand saw a 44% improvement in site speed and a 14% decrease in bounce rate, which had a positive impact on the brand’s bottom line: Dermalogica increased sales by 119% and conversion rate by 45% within just one month.
20. Implement data privacy and security measures
The sheer volume of data which brands collect on consumers is a cause for concern—not only for security teams that have governance over this information, but also for customers. Per Customer Experience Dive, more than 9 in 10 customers are concerned about how brands use their data, and in 5 will avoid a brand if they have these concerns.
Set internal policies and standards that describe the data you’re collecting and how it will be governed. That might include data ownership policies to define which team member is responsible for safeguarding information, and using PCI DSS-compliant payment processors to prevent customers’ credit card data from falling into the wrong hands.
Outline your commitment to data protection on your online store to cater to shopper’s privacy concerns. Whether it’s a detailed privacy policy or the promise of being able to opt out of personalized emails at any time, safety is the foundation for a positive ecommerce experience.
World-class experiences turn website visitors into satisfied customers
Outstanding customer experiences are what bring shoppers back—but they are increasingly harder to offer once your business scales.
At Shopify, we have a world-class ecosystem of features and apps to make customer retention possible. Whether you’re building a customer loyalty program or making improvements to your site speed, you can do it all from the ecommerce platform you already know and love.
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FAQs on ecommerce customer experience
What is the ecommerce customer experience?
The ecommerce customer experience describes the thoughts and feelings that online shoppers experience when interacting with your brand. A positive experience can increase your site’s conversion rate, build loyalty, and encourage word-of-mouth referrals.
How to increase customer experience in ecommerce?
- Use data to personalize product recommendations
- Offer a seamless checkout experience
- Set clear expectations for shipping and return timeframes
- Optimize your site speed
- Offer self-service support documentation
- Improve your website navigation
- Offer AR and VR experiences
- Reward loyal customers
- Offer omnichannel customer support
What does it mean to have an ecommerce experience?
An ecommerce experience describes the way you make customers feel throughout their online shopping journey. It’s the sum of all interactions, starting from their first interaction to date (or their final touchpoint).
How do you measure customer experience in ecommerce?
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Customer retention rate
- Churn rate
- First contact resolution
- Average resolution time
- Repeat customer rate
