How to create an ecommerce customer journey map

Ever wonder what your ecommerce customers are really thinking as they browse, click, and (hopefully) buy? Creating a customer journey map is like stepping into your users’ shoes—it’s a visual guide to understanding how they interact with your site, what excites them, and where they might be getting stuck.

A well-crafted ecommerce customer journey map helps you uncover golden opportunities to boost conversions and solve problems you didn’t even know existed. And the best part? You don’t need to be a data wizard to get started.

In this guide, we cover

• 5 steps to create an ecommerce customer journey map

• 6 types of user data you need to create a customer journey map

How to create a customer journey map for your ecommerce company

Every customer journey map is different—the data you include will be unique to your company. But if you’re an ecommerce business of any size, there are 5 steps you’ll need to take:

1. Define your goal

Are you trying to get more sales from visitors on mobile? Or more customers advocating for you? Or perhaps you want to reduce the bounce rate on your checkout page? 

By agreeing on a goal with your team, you can build your customer journey map with the right insights, metrics, and analyses in mind.

1. Gather relevant, accurate data

Gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data for maximum efficacy in your customer journey maps. The more data you have, the better, but the data you include in your map should always relate to your overall goal. 

For example, let’s imagine that your goal is to increase sales. In this scenario, you could:

• Learn how customers navigate your store across the shopping journey by conducting usability testing

• Use surveys and interviews to understand what information customers need during the consideration phase

• Gather behavior analytics data to uncover pain points and signs of frustration during the checkout process

• Gauge overall satisfaction by tracking customer NPS® across their entire pre-purchase journey

💡Pro tip: using Contentsquare? Your job just got easier! 

With voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools like Surveys, you can ask visitors both closed and open-ended questions. It’s also important to ask the right questions so you get the right answers. Once you have specific answers to your questions, you can apply what you’ve learned to your ecommerce customer journey and identify which stages are most affected by each UX issue.

For example:

• Don’t just ask: What do you think about our online store?

• Ask: What’s one change that we could make to improve your shopping experience?

• Don’t just ask: Does this page have everything you need, Yes/No?

• Ask: What would you like to see added to the page?

• Don’t just ask: Is our website easy to use, Yes/No?

• Ask: Were you able to find what you were looking for today?

Take your surveys to the next level with Contentsquare: ask precise questions and get the answers that matter

1. Create user personas for the customers you’re trying to serve

Depending on your goals, you might want to create multiple maps for different ‘types’ of customers. For example:

• New customers + Existing customers

• Actual customers + Ideal customers

• B2B customers + B2C customers

Creating separate maps for your different customer types ensures more accurate, actionable maps. However, you’ll need a clear idea of who these customers are and how you can identify them. That’s why it’s a good idea to create a user persona for each distinct customer you’re trying to help.

An example persona from UXPressia

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare to create segments based on specific user behaviors, such as new or returning customers. By analyzing these segments, you can develop detailed user personas—representations of your typical users based on key characteristics like demographics, preferences, and behaviors. You can then use our tools, like Heatmaps and Session Replays, to analyze the behavior of these specific user personas. This helps you understand the needs and motivations of different user groups and optimize the customer journey accordingly.

Contentsquare lets you analyze specific user segments

1. Unravel your customer referral paths

Your customers interact with your ecommerce business in various places, both online and offline. Understanding how these touchpoints fit together—and delivering a consistent experience across them—is the goal of omnichannel marketing.

In some cases, their journey will be a straight line:

• The prospect enters ‘best winter jackets’ into a search engine

• They immediately find your blog, click through to your store, and make a purchase

• A week later, the customer receives their order and goes on social media to share their satisfaction with the product

However, in other scenarios, the journey will be more complex:

• A prospect hears about your clothing brand from a friend 

• Weeks later, they see your brand on Instagram, visit your store, and sign up for your newsletter

• The prospect then visits two other physical clothing stores to compare jackets 

• A day later, they receive an email from you offering a 10% discount on jackets they previously viewed—they return to your online store to make a purchase

• The customer has a small issue with the order and calls your customer support line to resolve it

As a business, you might want to serve the second customer better so they can become an advocate, too. But to map out their journey accurately, you need to know where they came to you from—in other words, their referral path.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare to build an accurate map of omnichannel journeys. Ideally, you’ll look at data from two different tools.

• Look for referral paths in Contentsquare’s Product Analytics to find out where website visitors are coming from (e.g. organic search or email). 

• Use Surveys to fill in the gaps. For example, when a customer signs up for your email newsletter, send a survey asking how they discovered your brand.

Combining both these data points gives you a more complete customer journey map. 

A Contentsquare traffic attribution survey example

1. Create (and update) your maps

Having gone through the previous 4 steps, you can build maps for each key customer persona. Your team is now in a great place to analyze and improve critical touchpoints along the customer journey.

But don’t forget that your business is always evolving, so your maps need to evolve with it.

• Update journeys as they change. As you add new products, features, and marketing funnels, map out the new journeys your customers take.

• Track and update key metrics. If you’re including quantitative data in your maps, like NPS® or CSAT scores, track changes and update your maps every quarter.

6 types of user data you need to create a customer journey map

If you choose to create a customer journey map, you’re already engaging in data-driven marketing. Make your maps as useful as possible by taking relevant information from a wide range of sources.

1. Website journey data

Website journey data is an essential part of your ecommerce website analysis toolkit. It gives you a high-level overview of how people use and move through your site. 

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis to dig deeper into how users navigate your site. Identify key drop-off points, detours, and high-performing paths with visualized user flows. Compare journeys across segments—like new vs. returning customers—to uncover behavioral differences and fine-tune your customer journey map for maximum impact.

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis tool lets you see how customer journeys vary across different channels and personas

2. Behavior analytics data

Understanding the journeys your visitors take is just the start—behavior analytics dives deeper. It reveals how users interact with each page, from clicks and scrolls to hesitations and rage clicks. These insights help you uncover pain points that might go unnoticed, such as unclear navigation or distracting design elements.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay tools to identify and address distracting design elements:

• Scroll heatmaps show you where people stop scrolling on your product and support pages, so you know which parts of your page go unseen

• Click heatmaps show you where people are clicking most, indicating how intuitive your UX design is and giving you ideas for improvements

• Session replays let you rewatch individual users journeys to find out how customers behave, where they get stuck, and what they do before clicking your call to action (CTA)

See where users struggle on your website with Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool

3. Email queries, chat logs, and customer support logs

Your company’s everyday conversations with customers are a gold mine of insights. They reveal what users commonly get frustrated with, what information they need, and how often specific problems occur.

Ideally, use a tool like Zendesk or Intercom to categorize and log customer queries and support requests. Then, you can hold regular reviews with your sales and support teams to see how the trends fit into your customer journeys.

Customer support platform Intercom visualizes common conversation topics

4. On-site and email surveys

Asking your customers for feedback is an effective way to understand their experiences at different parts of their journey. In addition to getting subjective, descriptive feedback, surveys also give you quantitative data (like NPS® scores) to support optimization efforts.

For example:

• Following an interaction with customer support: email a survey that asks respondents to rate their customer satisfaction level. Include an open-ended question prompting customers to describe what you could do better.

• Following a successful purchase: target shoppers with an on-site survey asking them to submit an NPS®. Then, track how this score changes as you update and improve to your checkout process.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s post-purchase surveys to gather actionable insights directly from customers after they complete their purchase.

Track changes over time to measure the impact of your updates and ensure your checkout process continues to meet customer expectations.

5. Funnel analysis

The term ‘funnel’ describes the path ecommerce site visitors take and how it inevitably narrows as some people decide to leave the site or become a customer at the end of their journey. 

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis to trace the customer journey through specific steps (or web pages) that, hopefully, result in conversions or signups. This allows you to optimize the process by analyzing how many visitors end up in each stage. Knowing when your potential customers drop off at each stage is imperative for increasing your site’s lifetime value and conversion rates.

Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis tool lets you see where customers drop off or fail to convert throughout their journey

6. Customer interviews

Having one-on-one discussions with customers is a great way to learn more about their needs, motivations, and pain points. You might find it helpful to offer customers an incentive to speak with you, but satisfied customers will often do so for free.

However, don’t focus solely on happy customers. Performing exit interviews with regular customers who change to another supplier can reveal a weak link in the customer journey.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Interviews tool makes it easy to recruit, schedule, and conduct customer interviews. It also features built-in AI for accurate transcriptions to help you get even deeper insights.

Use Contentsquare’s Interviews tool to speak directly to the people who can give you the most helpful insights—your users.

Start mapping your ecommerce journeys today

The more complicated your customer journeys are, the more opportunities you have to delight—or disappoint—your audiences. Customer journey maps give your company a shared framework for improving their experiences across the entire conversion funnel.

But remember: your customer journey maps are only as good as the data you used to create them. By researching the what, how, and why of your customers’ behavior, you’ll build effective customer journey maps that drive real impact.

FAQs about ecommerce customer journey map