What is Customer Journey?

The traditional customer journey model breaks the path into five stages: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and post-purchase (retention and advocacy). In e-commerce, this translates roughly to discovery (ad, search result, social post), evaluation (browsing the store, reading product pages), comparison (checking reviews, comparing alternatives), conversion (adding to cart and completing checkout), and follow-up (delivery, usage, review request, repeat purchase).

Modern customer journeys are rarely linear. A shopper might discover a product through a TikTok video, visit the store on mobile, leave without buying, receive a retargeting ad the next day, return on desktop, read reviews, leave again, click a Google Shopping listing a week later, and finally purchase. This multi-touch, multi-device reality makes mapping and optimizing the journey significantly more complex than the neat funnel diagrams suggest.

Each stage of the journey presents both an opportunity and a risk. At the awareness stage, your brand needs to be visible and compelling enough to earn a click. During consideration, your product pages need to provide enough information and trust signals, particularly reviews and social proof, to keep the visitor engaged. At the decision stage, price, shipping, and return policies often become the deciding factors. Post-purchase, the experience of unboxing, product quality, and follow-up communication determine whether the customer becomes a repeat buyer or leaves a negative review.

Mapping your customer journey requires combining quantitative data (analytics funnels, attribution reports, cohort analysis) with qualitative insights (customer interviews, survey responses, support ticket themes). The goal is to identify the moments where customers drop off or hesitate and to design interventions, whether content, social proof, incentives, or UX improvements, that address those specific friction points.