Customer Pain Points: How to Find and Solve Them
- Define a customer pain point as a specific problem a customer meets on the journey, not a general wish for lower prices.
- Sort pain points into four types: financial, productivity, process and support.
- Combine qualitative research, which tells you why, with quantitative research, which tells you how many.
- Read the data you already have first: support tickets, chat logs, reviews and survey comments.
- Measure satisfaction before and after delivery, because each moment shows different pain points.
- Fix the pain points that hurt the most customers and your most valuable customers first.
- Close the loop: tell customers what you changed and measure again to check that the fix worked.
Customer pain points are the specific problems customers and prospects meet along their journey with your business: a price that feels too high for the value, a checkout with too many steps, a parcel that arrives late, a support team that does not reply. To find them, you listen to the voice of the customer through qualitative and quantitative research. To solve them, you fix the problems that cost you the most customers first.
Customers want convenience, efficiency and value for money. When a business offers a clear view of its products and listens to what customers say, it keeps existing customers, attracts new ones and earns better returns. This guide is part of our eCommerce customer experience series. It covers the types of customer pain points, how to find them, examples and how to solve them. Omniconvert Explore runs the on-site surveys that bring most of them to light.
What are customer pain points?
To understand pain points fully, a business has to stop thinking like a retailer and take the customer's position. A pain point can be about money, about time, about a complicated product or about a process the customer feels is redundant. It is not the same as a complaint. A complaint is one customer telling you about one problem. A pain point is the underlying problem many customers share, and most of them never complain: they simply buy elsewhere.
That is why pain points matter for revenue. In a 2025 survey of US consumers, 52% said they stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services, and 29% stopped because of poor customer experience online or in person [PwC, 2025].
Types of customer pain points
1. Financial pain points
Financial pain points are about money: where customers feel they spend too much and want to spend less. Most customers look at price to judge both affordability and the value they will get. A common mistake is to think that the lowest price wins in a competitive market. Customers like cheaper things, but they also want value for money, so a price cut is not always the right fix. Other financial pain points include:
- Repeat purchases: some customers prefer to buy in bulk, because it cuts their total cost and saves time.
- Reusability: a product customers can use many times can sell at a higher price, because customers do not like frequent repeat purchases.
- Ongoing costs: a subscription spreads the cost, which some buyers like; others prefer to pay once.
- Product life: how long the product lasts before the customer must buy it again. Low-quality products lose here, because frequent repurchase costs time and money.
2. Productivity pain points
Productivity pain points are about time and effort. Customers want an efficient experience, and anything that adds redundant steps to the customer experience throughout the customer journey causes frustration. Design products for convenience and usability. FAQs, short tutorials and chatbots solve many productivity problems, and a checkout with fewer steps makes your store easier to buy from.
3. Process pain points
Process pain points look like productivity pain points, but they come from your internal processes. The customer feels the business should run them better, and starts to have problems they think are fully avoidable. Examples are complicated product rules that are hard to remember, disconnected systems that ask for the same information twice, and software that needs extra training before use. Process pain points are common in business-to-business sales, where buyers often pay more for a supplier that is easy to work with.
4. Support pain points
Support pain points appear when customers do not get help during the buying process or after it. Customers need timely answers when they buy, or they will look for the same product elsewhere. A typical example is a support channel with loops, where the customer does not know the best way or the best time to reach someone, or whether anyone will see the request. The fix is support on the channels customers already use (phone, email, social media and live chat) and support tickets that keep each conversation traceable and tagged.
| Type | What the customer feels | Where you see it | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial | "It costs too much for what I get" | Cart abandonment at shipping costs, price comments in surveys | Show value and total cost early; bundles; clear product life |
| Productivity | "This takes too long" | Drop-offs in long forms, repeat questions to support | Fewer checkout steps, guest checkout, FAQs and tutorials |
| Process | "This should not be so complicated" | Return and exchange tickets, duplicate data requests | Simplify rules, connect systems, self-service returns |
| Support | "Nobody helps me" | Slow first replies, unresolved tickets, low post-delivery scores | Omnichannel support, live chat, tracked tickets |
How to find customer pain points
Pain points are often simple once you see them, but finding them is the hard part. There are two kinds of research, and you need both.
Qualitative research is defined as research that collects open-ended answers, such as words, stories and observations, to understand why people behave as they do. It is often neglected, because businesses prefer numbers, but it is the best way to find what is wrong with a product or a service. Typical methods are focus groups, face-to-face interviews, observation and telephone interviews. Our guide to qualitative research covers each method. Ask questions such as: why did some products sell well in one season or one region? Who is our target audience? What do competitors do that customers like? It is also important to identify your target audience's needs, because those people are your future customers.
Quantitative research works with numbers only. It answers "what" and "how many": how many customers do we target, how many channels do we have, how far did our SEO reach? It does not answer "why". It is popular because the data is easy to analyze and compare with other sources. Typical methods are polls, surveys and questionnaires. A survey built on a Likert scale turns agreement with statements such as "Delivery was on time" into scores you can track.
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Read the data you already haveExport support tickets, live chat logs, product reviews and social media mentions. These are pain points customers already took the time to describe.
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Ask on the page where the problem happensRun a short website feedback survey on the checkout, the product page or the order tracking page, with one open question such as "What almost stopped you from buying today?"
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Measure satisfaction before and after deliverySend a Net Promoter Score survey after purchase and again after delivery. A low score before delivery points to the website; a low score after it points to the product, the shipping or the service.
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Talk to customersInterview a few recent buyers and a few customers who did not come back. Ask open-ended questions and let them tell the story of their last purchase.
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Watch what customers doCheck funnel drop-offs and watch session recordings of the steps where people leave, to see the problem behind the number.
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Tag, count and prioritizeTag every answer as financial, productivity, process or support, count how often each pain point appears, and rank them by how many customers they affect and how valuable those customers are.
Net Promoter Score is one of the best KPIs for measuring and monitoring customer satisfaction. Learn how it works in the Ultimate NPS Guide.
Read the Ultimate NPS Guide →A mistake practitioners hit often with this research is asking at one moment only. A store sends one satisfaction survey right after checkout, gets good scores and concludes there is no problem. But at that moment the customer has not yet received the parcel. Late deliveries, damaged products and sizes that do not fit appear only after delivery, so the survey misses the financial and support pain points that cause most churn. The store keeps spending on acquisition while the same customers leave after their first order. Survey at both moments, and compare them.
Customer pain point examples in eCommerce
The table below gives one or two examples for each type, with the signal that usually reveals it. Use it as a checklist when you tag your own survey answers and tickets.
| Pain point example | Type | Signal in your data |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping costs appear only at the last checkout step | Financial | High exit rate on the shipping step |
| Product wears out after a few uses | Financial | Returns and low post-delivery scores for one product |
| Checkout forces account creation | Productivity | Drop-off on the registration step |
| Size guide is missing or unclear | Productivity | "Does this fit?" questions in chat; size-related returns |
| Returns need an email, a form and a phone call | Process | Return tickets with several follow-ups |
| Delivery is late and there is no tracking link | Support | "Where is my order?" tickets |
| Support replies after several days | Support | Long first response time; repeat contacts |
How to solve customer pain points
Do a full voice of the customer (VoC) analysis
Voice of the customer (VoC) is defined as the feedback customers give about their experiences with and expectations of your products and services. Do not assume you already understand your customers' problems. A full VoC analysis tracks social media mentions, support conversations and open-ended survey answers, and places each problem on the customer journey. Wharton's research explains why customer journey mapping is at the heart of digital transformation, and our customer journey map guide shows how to build one.
Address pain points with the right tool
A pain point you find but do not fix in time stays a pain point. Many simple questions do not need an agent: eCommerce chatbots and live chat answer them at once, instead of putting customers in a queue for hours. Send complex problems to support agents, and keep in touch with those agents, because they see new problems first. Customer needs change constantly.
Use an integrated support channel
An omnichannel customer experience gives customers the same help on every channel, from one system. Agents see every past interaction, so they answer faster and better, and no customer is left waiting. You will find more customer experience articles on our blog.
Analyze the results and close the loop
After you fix a problem, go back to the feedback. Which issues did customers raise? Did the fix solve them? What else can you improve in the customer journey? Customers need to know that you did more than answer their question: you took steps so the problem does not happen again. Our step-by-step guide on how to improve customer experience in eCommerce shows how to build this loop into the whole business.
Walk with your customers
Improving the experience means you stay with customers through the solution. Show them how it works, and explain why it is the best option for their case.
Some pain points matter more because of who feels them. To see which ones cost you your most valuable customers, connect the feedback to customer data. Omniconvert Commander (formerly Nexus), the AI eCommerce growth engine, groups customers into RFM segments and calculates customer lifetime value, so you can check which segment each problem comes from. On Shopify, it is available as a Shopify app.
Case study: the pain points a fashion retailer found after delivery
A fashion retailer measured Net Promoter Score twice: once after purchase and once after delivery. One month after launch, the pre-delivery NPS was 77 and the post-delivery NPS was 51 [Omniconvert, fashion retailer NPS case study]. The website and the campaigns raised expectations that the products and the service did not meet.
The open answers showed why. Low product quality appeared in 48% of the responses and low service in 29% [Omniconvert, fashion retailer NPS case study]: a financial pain point (value for money) and a support pain point. The brand kept sending flash sales, even to its best customers, and four months later the post-delivery score had fallen to 44 while the pre-delivery score stayed at 77. The full story is in our NPS case study. The lesson for pain point research: the question you ask after delivery finds the problems the checkout survey never sees, and a discount does not fix a quality problem.
Customer pain points FAQs
Customer pain points are specific problems that customers and prospects meet along their customer journey, such as a high price, a slow checkout, a confusing return process or support that does not answer. They interfere with the overall experience and push people to buy elsewhere. Some are simple to fix, but they are rarely easy to see from inside the business.
The four common types are financial, productivity, process and support pain points. Financial pain points are about money and value for money. Productivity pain points are about time and effort. Process pain points come from internal processes that customers feel are avoidable. Support pain points appear when customers cannot get help when they need it.
Combine what customers say with what they do. Read support tickets, live chat logs and online reviews, run on-site and post-purchase surveys with one open question, and talk to customers in interviews. Then check behavior data, such as funnel drop-offs and session recordings, to see where the problem happens. Tag every answer by type and count how often each pain point appears.
Use qualitative and quantitative research. Talk to customers and prospects, and drive the conversation with open-ended questions such as what almost stopped them from buying. Then check how often the same problem appears in surveys, lost-deal notes and support data, so you act on patterns rather than on one loud opinion.
Common eCommerce examples are surprise shipping costs at checkout, products that break or wear out fast, a long checkout with forced account creation, slow delivery without tracking, a complicated return process, and support that takes days to reply. Each one belongs to one of the four types: financial, productivity, process or support.
Start with a voice of the customer analysis so you know the real problem, not an assumed one. Fix the pain points that affect the most customers and your most valuable customers first. Use chatbots and live chat for simple questions, an integrated support channel for complex ones, and tell customers what you changed. Then measure again to check the fix worked.
A complaint is one customer telling you about one problem. A pain point is the underlying problem that many customers share, whether or not they complain about it. Most customers who meet a pain point never complain: they leave. Complaints are a useful source for finding pain points, but they show only part of them.
This week, export the last three months of support tickets, chat logs and survey comments. Tag each one as financial, productivity, process or support, and count them. The top two tags are your first pain points, and you found them without a new research project.
Then ask one open question where those pain points happen: on the checkout page, after delivery, or on the return form. Fix what the answers confirm, test the fix, and measure again. Omniconvert Explore runs the survey and the A/B test in one place.
Ask customers where it hurts, then test the fix
Omniconvert Explore runs on-site surveys, NPS surveys, A/B tests and personalization in one tool. Find the pain point, change the page, and measure whether the change helped.