As consumers, we decide to find a product to fulfill a perceived need; a solution to a problem we’re facing in our lives.
We then explore potential remedies for the situation we’re in, rapidly discovering new options as we search billions of results across the web in less than a second.
We consider the options based on a variety of factors. It would be easy to say we line them all up, compare the features, and choose the product that gives us the best features for the lowest price. But this oversimplified approach comes with endless questions. What are the best features? We don't all have the same priorities. What’s the lowest price? Is it $20 for something that will be useless in a year, or is it $50 for something that will be useful for three?
Perceived value is the key factor in purchase decisions. If we perceive the value of the exchange to be in our favor, we’ll buy.
After we’ve decided to purchase, we’ll find reasons to justify—or rationalize—our decision. You read that right. We don’t rationalize our purchase before making the decision. We justify it after.
As a retailer, this paints a nice picture of how you should approach sales:
- Make it easy for shoppers to recognize that you sell a solution to their problem.
- Show them why your solution is uniquely valuable to them.
- Help them justify their purchase decision after they’ve chosen your solution.
The ecommerce customer journey is paved with emotion. Yet, many retailers think their success is a result of appealing to the buyer’s logical mind.
Now, let’s explore how psychology plays a role in the ecommerce customer journey and how we can measure the results of our emotion-based approach.
What causes us to buy?
We don’t buy products so we can own products. We recruit products to solve problems. These problems aren’t always straightforward.
When an expert in her field needs a new outfit for a keynote presentation, she doesn’t purchase the first outfit she can find in her size. She’ll search for something that expresses her personality. Given the context, an outfit that exudes confidence, looks professional but approachable, and effortlessly transitions to a networking event in the evening.
How will she choose where to buy the outfit? Will it be directly from a brand she knows well? A retailer that curates specific styles from different designers? Should she spend more than $500? $1,000?
What’s going through our character’s mind is a tug-of-war between social, functional, and self-fulfillment goals. Socially, she’d like to look as though she’s at the top of her game. But she doesn’t want to look so extravagant that she seems unapproachable.
Functionally, she wants an outfit that doesn’t need to be changed for a networking event at a trendy, farm-to-table restaurant. The overlap of her social and functional goals are an effort to find self-fulfillment through professional growth and acceptance by her peers.
Solving problems with an emotional response
As we face new problems, we try to find solutions. Our remedies are driven by emotion. We’re looking for a trustworthy company who sells a product that can best solve our problem. The variables in this journey are our unique criteria for the best solution.
Price-driven consumers will prioritize cost. Those who value a higher social status will reach for brands that convey luxury. Each buyer has a different matrix of perceived needs that drive their decision to purchase.
Great brands find the white space in the market and fill it with a pricing model, product quality level, and brand personality that’s appealing to this untapped segment of the market; also known as their target audience.
The beginning of the ecommerce customer journey: awareness
Defining true customer awareness
Is awareness when a customer first sees, recognizes, or remembers your brand? For us, this stage begins when prospects recognize your brand as one that could solve their problem. In effect, they know you exist and what you do. If, when they are faced with an issue that your products could solve, they don’t think of you—even among a handful of other retailers—then they aren’t really aware of you.
Awareness happens on your website
Awareness begins somewhere else, but it’s solidified on your website. Other websites, social media, organic & paid search, and display ads are examples of channels that generate awareness. Awareness has different levels of intent and attention. Organic social can be the source of a higher proportion of low-intent traffic. For new (or unaware) visitors, a large portion of high-intent traffic will come from organic search. Bringing prospects from discovery to awareness is a true art form. We don't focus on generating awareness at A Work of Cart; our art form is turning awareness into purchases.
Measuring awareness
Measure your website visitors’ awareness through engagement metrics. You can find these in your analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics).
Bounce Rate (or Engagement Rate in GA4)
Do your visitors find your site content relevant? Bounce rate will give you a good understanding of visitor engagement as people land on your site. If you have a high bounce rate, it could indicate that people aren’t finding (or don’t think they’ll find) what they’re looking for. Many variables could contribute to a high bounce rate—poor design, misaligned brand personality, poor communication, site speed issues—but it’s a useful metric for understanding when you need to start searching for a solution. There’s nothing worse than sending paid traffic to a landing page, just to watch 90% of it bounce. That would mean 9 out of every 10 clicks you paid for are gone before they even see your offer…yikes.
Note: in GA4, you’ll see “Engagement Rate” instead of Bounce Rate. Engagement rate is simply the inverse of bounce rate; it’s the percentage of your visitors who don’t leave without interacting with the landing page.
Session Duration
The length of time people spend on your site could be misleading. The key here is to make sure they’re spending time intentionally. Long session durations that visit a blog, a product page with a ton of reviews, or a personalized product quiz are quality sessions that indicate a visitor may be nearing consideration. Alternatively, a long time spent jumping between category pages could mean you need to fix your menu; that’s a tell-tale sign of confusion. In most cases, though, visitors who can’t find what they’re looking for won’t stick around for long.
Pageviews per Session
Similar to session duration, the number of pages viewed per session can be a good indicator of how shoppable your ecommerce website is. If you’ve done it right, you won’t have a ton of content to read through, so pageviews will be a better indicator of quality sessions than session duration. What matters most is the benchmark you set for your website. If you see that the average purchaser spends three minutes on your site and views 8 pages per session—and you have a reliable sample size for that calculation—then that should be your ideal. Not every brand will have the same ideal metrics, and that’s okay.
Page Scroll Depth
Selling is storytelling. The best ecommerce websites tell a story about their brand and their products. The best indicator of true awareness is scroll depth—or how far people are scrolling down your pages. Like a good book, with which you can’t stop turning the pages, a great website keeps visitors engaged until they can’t scroll any longer. You can track this with Google Analytics, but a heatmapping tool like Hotjar or Crazy Egg will help you know what people are seeing when they stop scrolling.
Build awareness to be remembered
Having a lot of traffic means nothing if that traffic isn’t engaging with your website. True awareness of your brand can’t stem from bounced, hasty, or shallow sessions.
Engaged users are more likely to remember you when they’re ready to consider purchasing products like yours. Many first-timers are unlikely to become customers on their first visit.
This is why you’ll want to build that awareness into memorability.
Turning awareness into consideration
Visitors who are aware of your brand—whether it’s their first or fourteenth visit—remain in this stage of the buyer’s journey because they haven’t yet considered a purchase.
These are the visitors who browse your website but don’t add products to their cart, among other interactions that indicate movement toward a purchase.
Desire is what moves us toward action. It’s not until we say, “I want that,” that we consider clicking the add to cart button. Generate desire for your products by communicating value across all your customer touchpoints.
Since visitors are unlikely to buy on their first few visits to your website, you need to find a way to stay top of mind. You could choose to do this through paid channels like social & display ad retargeting, but that’s not the most cost-efficient way to build a relationship unless you’re supremely confident in your ability to maximize CLV.
Instead, focus on building enough consideration for smaller commitments. Rather than asking for a purchase, channel new visitors into a more passive touchpoint like email or social. These channels give consumers more time to learn about your brand and help you deepen relationships. Playing the long game can have serious benefits. Keep your audience in these channels engaged (and growing) and you have a captive source of feedback, referrals, and revenue.
The shorter term approach to moving more people from the awareness stage to the consideration stage is offering discounts and creating urgency. Discounts are common, and they don’t move the needle as much as urgency. These strategies require a decent level of buyer motivation to work. In the end, you’re sacrificing revenue to speed up the purchase decision. Discounts could impact the perception of your brand or condition your customers to shop when you have a sale.
Sure, these methods work, but do you want to build a community that provides sustainable growth or teach your market to wait for your next 20% off email before they buy? You’ll hit all your KPIs in the short term, but you’ll wish you had invested more time in building an audience that will happily pay full price for your products.
The climax of the customer journey: consideration
Understand your customers, understand consideration
Awareness eventually blossoms into interest, which then becomes consideration. Your visitor can now start to envision using your product. However, they can still see a scenario in which they choose your competitor. Is it price? Brand-values alignment? Personality? Features? Each market is unique when it comes to customer needs. And within each market, you’ll find segments that have different values. Finding what works best for your brand requires customer feedback and controlled testing.
Your website is central to consideration
Potential customers could consider purchasing your product anywhere. Their Instagram feed, in a YouTube video, on TV, or while listening to their favorite podcast. The only place it matters (and best place for you to track) is on your website. The final source of truth when it comes to consideration for purchasing your product is your website. It’s where all the information is. It’s where the add to cart button is.
Reliable consideration happens over a long stretch of time. It begins with true awareness of your brand and is followed by an alignment of that brand recognition and a need for the products you sell. Without this mental connection, there is no consideration.
As your prospect begins to consider a purchase, they may explore your competitors’ offerings. They could watch a review of your product on YouTube, or take the old-fashioned route and read a blog post about it. You can save them time by featuring testimonials, in-depth reviews, and other customer-generated content on your site. The reason for leaving your site, during this stage, is to gain an outside perspective. You’re biased, as you should be. By freely offering up honest outside opinions on your site, you keep visitors from venturing too far while simultaneously building a high level of trust.
Measuring consideration
Learn more about consideration through engagement metrics & digital customer experience tools (e.g., Hotjar, FullStory).
Mailing list signups
Non-customers who want to hear from your brand are near a purchase. A growing email audience is an indication that people are deepening their relationship with your brand. Though they haven't made a purchase yet, you now have control of the conversation that influences them to buy.
Product page interactions
Any visitor interaction that signifies a search for product details (e.g., product image thumbnail clicks) is an indicator of consideration. These events are the steps between a product page visit and a click of the add to cart button. Collecting these metrics may require custom event setup in your analytics tool, but they're worth tracking.
Get a more visual understanding of customer interactions with heatmaps. Seeing where visitors are clicking and scrolling provides valuable context to your research. Focus on the most active areas of your product pages. Do those areas show movement toward a purchase? If not, test new ideas for getting more interaction on the areas that matter.
Add to cart rate
The rate at which visitors add a product to their cart is the ultimate measure of consideration.
Narrowing consideration to a purchase on your website
When the visitor perceives the value of your product to be more than its cost, you’re getting closer to the purchase stage.
External factors—competitors, financial fitness—could keep potential customers in the consideration stage. Actions can be taken to lessen the effect of external factors, but we're looking to impact areas that we control.
Keep competitors at bay by communicating the unique value of your products. What sets your brand apart from others in your segment? If what you offer can't be bought anywhere else, you’ll narrow consideration down to a purchase without much effort.
Now that you have your visitors' awareness, help them envision owning your products. Give them immersive detail; keep them engaged with video, imagery, and content that aligns with their values.
Including customer-generated content (e.g., social posts, photos, videos, testimonials) can be an impactful way of showing more product detail while sharing social proof. A sense of community around your brand shows that you're trustworthy. Customers can speak to your visitors in a way that you can't. They can share first-hand knowledge of how your products solve the problems they once faced. They're a valuable window into the current mindset of your visitors.
The retailer's goal of the customer journey: purchase
Finally, the purchase stage. To many, it's the only stage of the customer journey that matters. To us, it's a product of success in the awareness and consideration stages of the journey.
The path to direct-to-consumer purchases is long
Purchases occur on your website, but it's more complicated than that. A completed checkout doesn't appear out of thin air. By the time a visitor has reached the purchase stage of your ecommerce customer journey, you're wiping the sweat from your brow. The hard work is done.
The decision to purchase is a culmination of choices made along the way. These choices happen in your awareness and consideration stages. The curiosity that results in an ad click. The thirst for more detail that leads to cycling through images on a product page. Each of these interactions is a connection you sparked with a potential customer. Without these interactions, there is no purchase.
Measuring purchases
Total transactions
The number of purchases is central to understanding your success in the purchase stage. This much is self-explanatory. What's not, though, is how total transactions relates to prior stages in the ecommerce customer journey.
Cart abandonment rate
A checkout is how you'll measure success in the purchase stage, but your cart abandonment rate is where you'll find the nuance that occurs between the consideration and purchase stages. How many would-be buyers are leaving before making a purchase?
Boosting purchases on your ecommerce website
"How do I get more sales?" It has to be the oldest question in the history of business.
Let's first talk about the building blocks of a purchase decision.
To recap:
The awareness stage is about establishing relevance and trust. Show that your brand and products are trustworthy, aligned with your visitors' values, and the solution for your visitors' needs.
The consideration stage is about building desire. Stir up your visitors' interest. Show that your products are the best choice to solve their unique needs. Prove that you understand them; that you hear them. Set expectations for what it will be like to own your products. How will your would-be customer improve?
On to the purchase stage
You've shown that your products are relevant and desirable. You've established that your brand is trustworthy. Getting to a purchase means meeting or exceeding expectations during the final exchange. The most common reasons for abandoned carts aren't product-related. They're shipping, usability, or cost-related.
Setting & reinforcing expectations
The most common reasons for cart abandonment are preventable. Half of respondents to a 2021 Baymard Institute study said they "abandoned an online purchase in the last 3 months" because "extra costs were too high."
Communicate shipping costs throughout the customer journey. This is non-negotiable. Use an alert bar to highlight free shipping thresholds (e.g., "get free shipping on orders of $50+"). Charge flat-rate shipping costs on lower-value orders; note this cost on your product pages near the add to cart button. Eliminate this one surprise during checkout and avoid the primary reason for cart abandonment.
Like it or not, Amazon has shifted consumer expectations in a way that's impacting independent retailers. Three of the other ten reasons for card abandonment (as referenced in Baymard's study) are frustrations that Amazon has all but eliminated.
Matching two-day (or even same-day) delivery times is a giant hurdle for smaller businesses. Communicate your delivery times early in the journey and set an expectation for fulfillment times (e.g., "ships same day when ordered by 2pm").
Where you can alleviate the most common reasons for cart abandonment, you should. Don't make visitors create an account to check out. Make your checkout process simple; only ask for the information you need to complete the purchase and deliver it. Show the total order cost up front. Using a major ecommerce platform eliminates these issues for you.
Where you can't change your process, be open in your communication. Tell your visitors why, when, what, where, how, and how much. Collect and listen to visitor feedback. Letting your target audience dictate your next move is never the wrong choice.
.svg){kind=small}
