How to Improve Customer Experience in eCommerce: 7 Steps

Putting the customer first is no longer an option. It is a necessity. Competitors are close, advertising gets more expensive every year, and customers have more options than ever. You cannot keep lowering prices, and you cannot outspend every similar store. What you can do is care for your customers on purpose, at every step from the product page to the delivery and the return. This guide shows how to improve customer experience in eCommerce in seven steps, with the metrics that prove each step worked.

This post is the step-by-step how-to. For the full picture of what customer experience covers, read our eCommerce customer experience guide. For changes to the website itself, read our user experience improvements. For inspiration, see the eCommerce brands that nail customer experience. The surveys and tests in the steps below run in Omniconvert Explore.

What is customer experience?

Your products can be the best in the market, your prices can be fair, and people can see you as the industry leader. Customers will still remember the experience most. They do not care about your brand for its own sake. They care about their own problems, and they buy from the store that makes those problems easier to solve. Accept this before you start, because it changes what you measure.

The data supports it. In the fifth edition of its State of the Connected Customer research, 88% of customers said the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, up from 80% in the 2018 edition [Salesforce, 2022]. You want customers to come back, buy again and bring their friends. Customer experience is how you get there.

The cost of a poor customer experience

Customers leave quietly. In a 2025 survey of US consumers, 29% said they stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience [PwC, 2025]. Each lost customer has to be replaced with a new one, and acquisition costs more than retention. In financial services, Bain found that a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit [Bain & Company, 2001].

A common mistake practitioners make is to treat customer care as a cost center and reduce the experience strategy to coupons. A $25 coupon does not make up for the original problem, and a refund means you lose the sale anyway. Fix the cause, and the coupons stop being necessary.

How to improve customer experience in eCommerce: 7 steps

When you improve customer experience, you also change your culture. If the business focuses on products, every department has to align on a customer-centric way of working. Follow these steps in order, then repeat them.

1. Find the pain points

   Read support tickets, reviews and survey comments, and ask one open question where customers struggle. Our guide on how to find customer pain points shows the full method.
2. Measure customer satisfaction

   Track CSAT, NPS before and after delivery, and customer retention. Add an open question to each survey, so you know why a score moved.
3. Measure your service team

   Track first response time, resolution rate and mean time to resolution. Customer experience goes two ways.
4. Map the journey and check every factor

   Follow a customer from the first visit to the return, and check employee attitude, resolution time, buying, delivery, listening and product quality at each stop.
5. Put high-value customers first

   When you cannot fix everything at once, prioritize customer complaints and deal with loyal, high-value customers first.
6. Remove the products that cause unhappy experiences

   Look at customer churn by first product bought. Toxic products that disappoint buyers may need to go.
7. Test each fix and keep your promises

   A/B test changes to the website before you roll them out, and check that you deliver the value you promised before the sale. Then measure again.

Step 7 is where many teams stop too early. A change that looks like an obvious improvement can still hurt conversion: a shorter checkout may remove the reassurance some buyers need, and a new delivery promise may raise expectations you cannot meet. Run the change as an A/B test against the current version, on enough traffic to reach a reliable result, and keep the version that wins. Then ask the same survey question again. If the pain point no longer appears in the open answers, and the score at that step goes up, the fix worked. If not, go back to step 1 with what you learned.

Customer experience metrics to track

Some companies say they value customer experience but do not know how to measure it. The two groups below cover both sides.

A simple scale has one weakness: it tells you the score but not the reason. That is why every survey needs an open-ended question. It takes the customer a little longer, but it is a worthy trade-off. Net Promoter Score is defined as the percentage of promoters (customers who answer 9 or 10 to "How likely are you to recommend us?") minus the percentage of detractors (those who answer 0 to 6). Passives, who answer 7 or 8, count only in the total. Measure it before delivery, to learn how easy it is to buy from you, and after delivery, to learn how happy the customer is with the whole process. Our comparison of NPS, CSAT and CES explains when to use each one, and customer experience analytics shows how to combine them.

Factors to check along the customer journey

Employee attitude and behavior

Imagine you want to buy kitchen furniture. You narrow it down to two retailers. Retailer A has better prices, but its representative is irritated, does not explain the details and will not adjust to your needs. Retailer B costs more, but its employee suggests better ideas and solves your storage problem. You choose Retailer B. Employees are brand ambassadors, so train them to deal with demanding customers.

Resolution time

How much time passes between the first report and the solved ticket? If a customer waits months for an outcome, a fix will not bring them back.

Buying experience

Start with the first interaction. How easy is it to find the right product? How many steps are there until payment? How many payment options do you offer? Nobody wants to spend an hour placing an order, and next time they will look for a store with less hassle.

Delivery experience

You can offer an excellent buying experience and still see loyalty fall. Nobody likes to wait days for a courier, call a busy call center to find an order, or receive a damaged product. That is why you measure NPS after delivery, not only before it.

Listening

Pay attention to what customers say, even when it is bad. Answer their questions and invite them to start a conversation. Engaged customers feel seen and valued, and they are more likely to stay loyal.

Product quality

People need to get their money's worth. When reality is far below expectations, customers feel tricked and do not come back. Check churn by product, and remove the products that cause unhappy experiences. To see churn and value by segment, Omniconvert Commander (formerly Nexus), the AI eCommerce growth engine from Omniconvert, groups customers into RFM segments and tracks customer lifetime value and churn risk.

Above all, keep your promises. Phrases like "delight your customers" are common, but the real question is simpler: do you deliver the value you promised? Use surveys, interviews and qualitative research to find the honest answer. Improving customer experience is a marathon, not a sprint, and every department has to be part of it.

Case study: how a marketplace raised NPS in four months

The marketplace started with a pre-delivery NPS of 71 and a post-delivery NPS of 82 [Omniconvert, marketplace NPS case study]. The gap pointed to the website: customers liked what arrived more than how they bought it. The open answers named the problems: search, filters, payment and site speed.

The team fixed those steps and gave its most valuable customers priority support. Four months later, the scores were 78 before delivery and 84 after it, and the pre-delivery NPS of the best customer segment went from 72 to 89 [Omniconvert, marketplace NPS case study]. Read the full story in our NPS case study. The method is the one in this guide: measure at two moments, read the open answers, fix the biggest problem, and serve the best customers first.

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