Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping: Understanding customers so we can win them over

Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping is an analytical technique to guide ecommerce experience design in creating a customer-centric experience that converts visitors and delights customers. 

Ecommerce stores follow many of the same UX/UI standards. This is a great thing, as users can use ecommerce stores easily using their transferable experience from shopping at other stores, ie Jakob’s law. 

However, adapting the experience to your customer’s needs will help you achieve more: from converting visitors to reducing product returns and everything in between. 

What is Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping? 

It is an analytical technique that improves our understanding of users and customers by making us walk a mile in their shoes.  

To do this, it represents visually the stages, actions, feelings and pain points that a user or a customer might go through when shopping online (either generally, or zoomed in to a particular customer journey such as returns or loyalty point redemption). 

Then, it prompts us to think about the solutions, grounded in customer insight.

But attempting to fill a customer map with assumptions is little more than a box-ticking exercise. Before you can start with the template, you will need to do quite a few things. 

Follow these steps to complete an ecommerce customer journey map that will make a difference to your roadmap. 

How to do Ecommerce Customer Journey Mapping 

The way we use Customer Journey Maps at GENE follows the below steps, taking us all the way to validated solutions that we can start building. 

Pick a persona

We complete a map for each persona and journey. Hence, the first step is to pick a persona we want to explore. 

If you can, starting with just one persona is a great way to keep the research simple. If you’re only mapping one persona, make sure to focus on the most representative and typical customer. 

Pick a journey

A journey is a series of steps towards a goal. For example, “purchasing a product”, “returning a product” and “collecting a product from a store” are three distinct journeys that need to be prioritised accordingly and studied separately. 

We prioritise the most profitable journey. Usually, this is the First Purchase – ie, the first time a customer buys from us. Google Analytics can confirm this for us.

If you have a post-purchase NPS survey, these can reveal journeys that are troubled in important ways, also a good method to land on a journey we want to put under the microscope. Here’s more about NPS.

Spare a thought for the product that is part of the journey. Big-ticket items (washing machines or sofas) are purchased differently than smaller items. There is more research, more steps, and more people involved. This changes the journey, so needs to be considered in isolation.  

Research design 

Now that we know which persona and journey we will focus on, it’s time to design the research phase. 

For a Customer Journey Mapping exercise, we recommend live user interviews. This allows the team to explore the customer’s first purchase in-depth. Other methods such as user videos (Hotjar), web analytics (Google Analytics) and more generally desk research can be a great starting point for the research, but probably not enough in isolation.  

This is what we do when we plan to use in-depth interviews for customer journey mapping: 

• Invite participants. You will need users to interview. The users we select depend on the type of journey we are researching. For “First purchase”, non-customers are best. However for “Returning a product”, you ideally want to talk to customers who have returned a product before. This way they can comment on the current experience. 

• Decide how many to interview. The ideal amount of customers to interview depends on the saturation point. This is the moment where interviewing more people only confirms previous findings. We can treat research iteratively, inviting 5 participants, and leaving an open door to interview more. 

• Write discussion guides. We want to write our questions and scenarios / exercises in advance (of course), to make sure we cover all the ground we need

 
To recruit interview participants, you can use platforms such as User Interviews, User Zoom or Ethnio. 

But you can also use your customer service team to recruit customers, with the added benefit that you can select customers based on all the data you have about them, and the fact that they have already purchased from you. Sometimes, it’s best to use non-customers when analysing a first purchase journey. Sometimes, it’s best to use customers, such as when analysing customer experience pain points, or fulfilment. 

The next step is to write your discussion guide and the exercises and scenarios you will run with participants. A formula that can work quite well is: 

• 10’ of warm-up questions to get to know the participant, make them feel at ease and understand their behaviours in the category. A good way of doing this is to ask them to walk us through one or two of the last purchase journeys they made. (“tell me about the last piece of furniture you bought…” set of questions) 

• 15’ of exploration. We can ask the user to imagine a scenario (trying to be specific) where they need / want to purchase the product. We discuss with them how they would do that, then ask them to do it, see them do it, and ask them questions along the way. This means we see them use competitor sites, but also search engines, social media, Google images or whatever another method they use at this early stage. 

• 20’ of focus on our site. In this final phase, we ask them to use our site to try and find the product. This is an artificial ask, but it means users can now give us first impressions and a lot of useful insight into how our experience meets their needs, as well as how it compares to what they’ve done just before. 

After the interviews have been completed, we analyse themes and select the key insights, per stage.  

Mapping 

Now that we have talked to users, and have discussed and selected the key insight and most meaningful moments, it’s time to complete the map. 

For each map, we want to note down the journey, the persona and its description, and if relevant, the product they’re shopping for, receiving, using, or returning.  

Then, we decide on our relevant stages. As an example of a typical First Purchase, we may end up with the following stages: 

• Trigger – this is the moment when the user enters the market for the product in question. Not as useful for experience design, but still a worthy consideration. What gets them thinking about a new product? 

• Exploration – now the user is starting their research. Do they have a consideration set of brands in mind, or are they starting with a retailer-agnostic approach? Are they seeking inspiration (“ideas for living room”) and education (“how to choose the right blind type”), or are they going straight after the product? How long could this exploration phase take? How will the user make progress and keep tabs? Will there be other people involved?  

• Comparison – now the user is starting to shortlist their options. Are they refining the product they want based on this, or did they have a clear idea of what it was from the start? What attributes do they most care about? What sort of information are they looking for? What barriers are they encountering? What is the role of delivery in the decision? 

•  Purchase – What triggered the final decision to purchase? How would they want to pay? How do they want it delivered? What are their expectations or knowledge around return policies? 

Write How Might We? Questions 

“How Might We” (HMW) questions are the bridge between the analysis and the solution, allowing ideation sessions to have an insight-led foundation – and they double up as a brainstorming aid. 

Every need, problem, or opportunity we discovered on the Customer Journey Mapping can be an HMW question. 

For example. If a user is putting the same skirt twice in the basket with two different sizes because they don’t know how it fits, an HMW question is “how can we help users pick the right size on the PDP”.

Another example. If a user abandons the site because they don’t understand the difference between a heat pump and vent dryer, the HMW can be “How can we inform the customer about dryer types at the comparison part of the journey”

Facilitating brainstorming around these HMW questions will yield great ideas founded on customer problems. 

Prototyping and Validation 

Prototyping and validation enable us to explore different ways to bring the solution to the HMW question to life and test their ability to solve the problem. 

These steps deserve their own article, and we got too much of your time by now 🙂

Final Thoughts

An Ecommerce Customer Journey Map is just one way to analyse, visualise and represent the needs of the customers. 

But it’s a good, simple one 🙂