Table of Contents
Introduction
In this blog were going to be examining user journeys for E-Commerce business. What are they? Why do they matter? And how can we use them to improve the main business problems? Then we will finally explain how it can be integrated into your E-commerce business.
What is a User Journey in E-Commerce Business?
It’s the path your customers take when they’re using your product all the way from how they visit your site, how they pick, which options they want to select, how they pay for what they want plus much more. For customers using third party marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Ebay – You may see that buyers might buy your product by searching for what they want to buy and this is where the journey starts.
Tools: There are many handy online tools which are pretty user friendly, and has a lot of templates, and resource is that helped guide you through this process.
For example: https://uxpressia.com/ or https://www.totango.com/
Tip: Just google user experience journey tool and you will find many. Or you can simply use sticky notes.
Courtesy: https://www.nimble.com/
Why should E-Commerce Business Owners care?
Well, here’s the thing. If you understand what your customers are going through:
- You can make it easier for them to become customers
- Remain customers
- Bring in more customers
- Generate more Five Star reviews and loyal followers.
Check out this article – https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ by Jared Spool, who famously wrote about the $300 million button. Just changing one button on a website was worth 300 million to accompany because that button was making life miserable for the user’s and costing 1/3 of a $1,000,000,000 in sales.
So, my question is, do care about that now? Oh yes, you do.
And it’s not just about the external focus when you understand the user journey and how all the pieces fit together. This can have a profound impact on the internal dynamics and processes in your organization covering marketing, sales, production fulfilment, customer service, etc.
The user journey is a crucial piece of storytelling, which is how we get people both inside and outside our organizations to really remember and internalize what it is that we’re doing.
How can an E-Commerce business use it?
That’s what the rest of this blog is about. How to recognize the steps that your customers are taking. Or then you’re forcing them to take on their way to becoming a customer and then turning that knowledge into something that can transform your organization.
Let's introduce the concept of User Journey Maps
Now that we’ve realized that user journeys matter, we’re going to look at the key tool you’ll need to make this abstract concept a journey because it is fairly abstract. You need to make this accessible to more than just the researchers and designers on your team.
And that thing that you’re going to need is a map, a User Journey Map.
Why a map? Why not just spreadsheets or a series of power points? One answer is that we call them maps, but they’re really part flow chart, part research report, part presentation and part contextual explainer. Journey Maps come with pictures, annotations and emoticons, even videos or animations.
A user journey map are utilitarian documents. They serve a real purpose. People respond to stories that they can understand. Graphic representations help people follow along.
When you’re trying to convey something that is multi layered and sophisticated, when the people making the decisions see how everything is connected and it tells a story that has a beginning, middle and end.
We use maps to help us understand complex systems and interactions. Above all, we want our maps to help us figure out how to solve the problems.
Kinds of User Journey Maps
We’ve identified six basic types and increasing order of complex city:
It shows both sides of a value creation process. From user side – what the user is doing, how they’re behaving, what they’re feeling. And other side they show the products and processes that are going hand in hand with the users at that stage of the journey where the two overlap is where the exchange of value is created.
This one just shows what experiences are available as you progress along a particular path. Walking through a mall, taking the family to the zoo as you see here and then the experience.
This shows what happens when someone participates in an experience or receives a service.
It illustrates how a user becomes a customer. What they do while being a customer and what they do next.
It is bit more defined than experience map and can be more like infographics.
This is concerned with diagramming human feelings and motivations, examining really intense abstract things like the user’s individual tasks, motivations, feelings, philosophies and fears.
4 Steps to go through to Build a Perfect E-Commerce Customer Journey
1. Select a process
Is it going to be the process of adding items to your online shopping cart? Or maybe it’s an internal process, like what the staff has to do to invent and produce an experimental new product or, most often, a mix of the two
2. Select a user
Here we are getting more specific inside of the process. It could be the customers journey from searching the product to getting the product at their home
3. Identify and Validate the touch points
It is all about breaking things down into steps. are all the moments for user how they move through the process until they come to another touch point. For example, moments when they saw your listing on Amazon with 5000 Five Star reviews, and then talk about it at office, and then to receiving the package, unboxing it etc
4. Get the data to apply and Inform map
This is where you use existing data not to make predictions, but just to tell you where you are. Now. Your user journey map should show you how things were functioning now and apply data sources like Google Analytics sales funnel data to a user journey.
Note– There are Critical Inflection Points or CIP – These are moments when the entire process hinges upon one little decision function, feeling or lack thereof.
You might want to look for listings that function as a magnet, attracting customers in to check out the product.
Crafting the E-Commerce Customer Journey Map
The first step in crafting a customer journey map is to select which process and which journey to map. Which leads to the question.
- How do we select the process?
- What kinds of processes are there to map?
- Is it just internal versus external, or are there other categories?
One good guideline for this is to go back how to identify a legitimate business problem. Problems can then be converted into goals? The same thing works when you take those goals and then transform them into processes.
So, here’s some examples. Say your problem is that you need more customers. Well, let’s focus on the process of how someone becomes a customer.
- What’s the journey?
- How did they learn about your product?
- How do they get interested in your solution?
Another problem. You need better conversion rates, so look at the shopping cart and check out processes.
Maybe the problem is the quality is inconsistent because the raw materials are inconsistent. So, let’s look at the purchasing process then.
Maybe the problem is that we’re getting a lot of complaints about how stuff is being delivered, all jumbled together. Late or damaged. The goal was to improve the delivery process, so the process there would be to look at how your products being packaged and delivered for our purposes.
Example
Let’s say our eCommerce Brand Goals are:
- We need more customers.
- We need to sell more to our existing customers.
- We need to get more efficient about what we produce. So that we don’t waste money making stuff people don’t buy.
- And we got to get better at connecting our marketing in ad spending to sales.
Based on our experience, Brand owners are interested in their customers and the revenue generated by them. That leads to building the Customer Journey Map.
Customer Journey for Amazon FBA E-Commerce business
When a potential buyers visits Amazon or any other third party Marketplaces like Walmart etc, then starting point is a search for something they desire or intend to buy.
- Customer visits Amazon store
- Search for the product
- Select the product which is mostly based on the quality of image, description and no of great reviews
- Customer buys the product and that’s where an unknown buyers start engaging the Brand
Most of the Brand Owners fails to engage those unknown buyers and thus never converts them to from unknown to loyal follower.
Above customer journey map highlights the various touch points which allows the buyer to leave a review, engage with Brand by leaving their details and buy again from Amazon or their own store.
Once the buyer is converted, Brand has got the real asset (customer contact details) which will allow them to market freely.
