Want to unpack some techy/marketing-speak/eCommerce jargon? Let’s talk about The Buyer’s Journey.

Definition of “The Buyer’s Journey”

This is a kind of eCommerce jargon that simply means the process that a shopper takes to find and purchase your jewelry. 

The short version of the journey looks like this:

• Discovery – craft shows, public relations, social media

• Contemplation/consideration – thinking over whether this product fits with their budget, lifestyle and values. Dreaming about how it will make them feel.

• Decision – The stage where they decide whether or not to add to cart and fork over their money.

Easy-peasy, right? I mean, chances are you’ve experienced this as a customer on a website somewhere and didn’t know that it was all designed to draw you in.

Consider your customer’s experience

Thinking about how different customers take the journey is important to make sales and create loyalty. It’s the hows and the whys that trip up most people. 

Taking an objective look at our hard work can be uncomfortable as is viewing your work through the customer’s eyes.

This is why I like to reframe the process as one that simply considers how welcome your visitors feel when they enter your site.

So let me tell you about a time that I felt distinctly unwelcome.

Siri – show me the opposite of a useful buyer’s journey

A few weeks ago, I nearly threw my computer across the room doing something I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times – booking an airline ticket. 

I’ve been booking tickets online since 1997. In some cases I have booked the exact same flight many times, since I live two states away from my family. I’ve been doing this for years but the process has steadily been changing, and this time it was terrible, messy, and outright deceptive. Hostile even.

Have you considered…not deceiving your customers?

This time I was fully aware that the process is designed to confuse, designed to trick, and designed to enrich the company but not designed to help me, their customer of many years, in any way. 

My short list of grievances are as follows:

• Pre-selected choices for upgraded seats that would cost me more and with no clear way to unselect the option.

• A lack of clarity that if I hit the back button that I would keep whichever reservation I was working on.

• A lack of clarity around what I would actually be paying.

• A timer counting down that was designed to short-circuit my decision making process.

I hate this for us. I hate it so much that I might actually take Amtrak next time I need to visit family.

This once straightforward process has become so customer unfriendly that I would rather inconvenience myself by spending a full 24 hours traveling by train than deal with a single point in their terrible user experience.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Making the internet a better place

This experience had me thinking about how we, as individual makers and small business owners, can push back against this by making our own corners of the internet more welcoming, friendly, and useful. And how we can think about all the ways we make our sites seamless for shopping, welcoming to all visitors and how we can avoid putting too many stumbling blocks of frustration in their way.

I believe in taking bad experiences and asking ourselves how we can make it better 

I apply these bad experiences to my own site all the time.

• I made the decision recently to turn off third-party cookie collection on my site and install privacy-focused analytics. In other words, I won’t be collecting your personal data. I don’t need that cookie pop-up anymore meaning I have removed one more task that my visitors have to perform when they come to my site.

• I also moved my newsletter sign-up to a banner notice and static page, rather than a pop-up.

I love to think through all of the ways that we can make small corners of the internet more accessible, welcoming and easy to use. I want the opposite of hostile architecture and the opposite of deception for all of us.

Aaaaaand here comes the pitch*!

This is exactly what we can do together with The eCommerce Edit.

We can make sure that your website works for all of your visitors.

We can go through your buyer’s journey and tweak it, revise it and test it to make sure that it helps build trust with your audience. Book a free discovery call and tell me how I can help you make your website more welcoming.

*I believe in transparency at all stages of business. That’s why I’ve shared who my suppliers are and why I share a lot about how business works. It is also why I’m not trying to hide the fact that I am pitching my services to you. If you don’t need them, no worries – feel free to ignore them and take the useful information on its own.