Retail Customer Journey Mapping: How to Create & Use (2025)

Retailers need a way to turn the jumble of TikTok swipes, in-store purchases, and customer loyalty redemptions into one narrative every team can act on. The latest omnichannel trends count over 50 touchpoints, spanning online and offline channels, which is impossible to track without a proper retail journey customer map. 

Recording and documenting these steps shows you the motivations behind each purchase. Mapping them provides a visual aid to plan your retail marketing campaigns and create excellent interactions at every step. 

Ahead, you’ll learn how to build a process for your organization and use Shopify to collect real-time data that keeps your customer journey map relevant and updated. 

What is a retail customer journey map?

A retail customer journey map plots every customer interaction a shopper has with your brand, from their initial discovery on TikTok to in-store checkout. It’s often displayed as a diagram or infographic. 

For retailers, this visual storyline shows omnichannel touchpoints such as:

• Mobile app browsing
• Curbside pick-up
• QR scans
• Meta ads

The map combines these channels with inventory, payment, fulfillment, and customer data to understand shopper emotions and pain points. It exposes gaps (like long queues or confusing returns flow) and highlights moments of delight (like one-click reorders and personalized loyalty programs).

Retail teams can enrich their mapping with predictive analytics tools to test fixes and see ROI faster. In the end, you get a single source of truth that helps teams align on what matters to the customer and how to optimize continuously. 

Key stages of the retail customer journey

Awareness

At this stage in the retail customer journey map, the shopper first learns about your brand. Discovery happens in-store, on search engines, or inside social feeds with short-form videos. 

A report from DataReportal found that the top channels for brand discovery are search engines and TV ads. Other notable channels include word of mouth and social media ads.

Key channels to optimize for this stage are:

• Paid and organic social posts
• Influencer live streams
• Local search listings and Google Shopping ads
• Window displays and pop-ups

Consideration

Research is second nature to modern shoppers. Only 4% of US consumers say they never read online reviews when weighing a purchase. 

Although customers may not know exactly what solution they’ll choose at this stage, they are comparing different options. 

This is where you’ll want to optimize:

• Product pages with rich media and real reviews
• AR try-on or 3D viewers
• Chat and video consultations
• Price-match and pick-up information in the cart

Shopify’s unified commerce solution helps you deliver continuity and relevance at key moments in the research stage. With it, you can route all POS, ecommerce, and marketing data into one customer profile. 

For example, staff can pull up a customer's profile and view all their purchases and preferences in-store. They can recommend exact sizes, upsell a matching accessory, and complete the purchase with a discount the shopper saw online. 

Acquisition

Shoppers move into this stage when they are ready to buy. The touchpoint here is your checkout process, whether it's through your website, retail store, or social media storefront. 

Retailers have to make the checkout process seamless to prevent customers from lingering in this stage of the journey. Offer multiple payment options, provide one-click checkout options, and make support easy to find. The best way to achieve this is by using Shop Pay for online payments and Shopify POS for in-store. 

For example, Shop Pay’s one-tap flow is up to 4X faster and has a 91% higher conversion rate on mobile than traditional checkout. In-store shoppers can use contactless payment options like Apple Pay and make Interac payments in Canada. 

Loyalty 

The loyalty stage takes place after a customer has made a few purchases. Customer touchpoints in this phase include:

• Omnichannel loyalty programs
• Word-of-mouth referrals
• Subscription purchases

Take Lola’s Cupcakes as an example. According to managing director Asher Budwig, the previous custom loyalty stack was costing the company “tens of thousands of pounds each month” in developer fees and checkout maintenance. 

The UK bakery rolled out “Lola’s Love Club”, a points-based loyalty program powered by the Smile.io app for Shopify. Now, shoppers can easily earn and redeem rewards whether they order online or at the counter. Every transaction flows into a single customer record. 

After switching to Shopify’s native toolset, Lola cut its total cost of ownership by more than half and added roughly 10,000 new members to the Love Club within the first months of launch.

How to create a retail customer journey map 

1. Define the goal of the customer journey map

Get consensus on the purpose and scope of the exercise from a variety of stakeholders. Consider whether the aim is to look at the end-to-end journey or a small piece.

Be sure to define:

• What the exercise is meant to accomplish
• Who will use it and how
• How you’ll share what you find with the entire company

2. Gather your data

First-party data is authentic and reliable because it comes straight from your customers. Examples include:

• Customer accounts and profiles
• Transaction and purchase history
• Website behavior and navigation patterns
• Product recommendation quizzes
• Loyalty program participation
• POS transactions

Third-party data is information you get from a company that doesn’t have a relationship with your target customers. It’s bought from vendors and provides a more broad outlook on an audience, but can be helpful to confirm patterns you’re seeing internally.

Some examples include:

• Age, gender, and income levels
• Internet browsing habits collected across many websites
• General market trends and research from industry reports

If you have multiple customer types, focus on your primary one. Create buyer personas, which are a snapshot that will help your company understand their needs, goals, feelings, thoughts and pain points. You can’t understand the journey if you don’t know your customer.

💡Tip: Shopify’s unified customer profiles log every piece of first-party data you collect on your customers—whether generated from a native Shopify feature (e.g., email carts) or a third-party app (e.g., Smile’s loyalty program). You get a real-time snapshot of who your customers are, no matter where they engage with your brand. 

3. Incorporate qualitative feedback

Depending on your time and budget, speak directly to your customers to create a true picture of who they are. This can be done formally through customer interviews or informally by spending time chatting with them in your retail locations. This is highly recommended if you want to validate the information coming from stakeholders and data.

4. List key touchpoints

Pull page-view paths, POS reports, and Shop app opens from your analytics. These often uncover touchpoints the team forgot, like a post-purchase SMS or curbside-pickup text. 

Invite marketing, retail ops, CX, and product to share their perspective on what the retail customer journey looks like. Give each group time to jot down touchpoints on sticky notes or a FigJam board. 

Then, group every touchpoint by category, like web, social, or store, like the example below.

5. Pinpoint emotions, pain points, and motivations

This step requires you to put yourself in the shoes of your customer to define the major goals they’re trying to achieve in their journey. These goals will represent the stages of your journey and can be high-level.

Mull over these questions with your customer hat on:

• What is the customer doing at each stage?
• What do they need to move them to the next stage?
• Why would the customer want to get to the next stage?
• How are they feeling?
• What is stopping them from moving to the next stage?

Take care not to have your journey map reflect your internal processes. Your retail business processes can be layered onto your customer’s journey once complete.

6. Visualize the retail customer journey 

This is where you pull together all of the information you’ve gathered so far: customer data and interviews, touchpoints and channels, goals, emotions and motivations, to create a visual representation of the shopping journey. The best place to start is with a paper and pencil or a large whiteboard.

There’s no set template for how you want to represent your retail customer journey map as long as it clearly communicates your customer’s story. It doesn’t have to be complicated, rather it should easily remind your employees of your customer’s needs.

How to use customer journey maps in retail

Improve marketing strategies

Plot ad impressions, email drops, and social touchpoints against the journey map to understand where spending is redundant or mistimed. Maybe you can reallocate the top-funnel budget into retargeting ads using Shopify Audiences, which can cut customer acquisition costs by up to 50%. 

You can also tweak your messaging to better align with customers' preferences and objections at each stage. A/B test different headlines and ad copy to mirror those emotions. Use Shopify Magic to assist your ecommerce copywriting by inputting customer data to understand and editing what the tool generates. 

Layer in Shop Campaigns for cost-controlled acquisition. The tool auto-optimizes creation, audience targeting, and placements in the Shop App and connected channels. The only time you pay is when a shopper converts, and all order data stays inside Shopify to analyze customer lifetime value. 

💡Learn: Cookware brand Caraway drove $1 million in revenue and a 16X jump in Shop app orders at a fixed customer acquisition cost. Read Caraway’s story. 

Offer omnichannel experiences

Highlight every switch from online to store (or vice versa) on the retail customer journey map. Note any friction points, like re-entering details at the POS or seeing two different prices between in-store and online properties. 

Footwear brand Allbirds, for example, saw stockouts at the “ready to buy” stage and turned on ship-from-store in Shopify POS. Retail staff now fulfill online orders, website conversion rose, and 31 locations act as micro-fulfillment hubs—no more lost sales from inventory silos. 

Better customer service

Over half of shoppers say they’ll leave a brand after one bad interaction. Use your journey map to create proactive alerts when shoppers drop off or report a bad customer experience. 

Set targets where delays cause the biggest defection risk, like post-purchase “where is my order?” moments. Some 90% of customers want the ability to check their order status. If it’s too difficult, they will likely get frustrated and not want to shop with you again.

An easy solution is to turn on Shop Pay. Customers can get real-time updates in the Orders tab and can contact your business via email or a social media platform. 

Pair that with Shopify Inbox, a native chat tool that uses Shopify Magic to draft AI-powered replies the moment a question is asked. It can cover return policies, product details, order status, and more, giving customers the immediate service they want. 

Improve customer retention

Retail customer journey maps reveal emotional high points and help you plan for them. A simple nudge to use a VIP discount or a post-purchase email offering how-to content makes you look like a customer-obsessed company (and those are the best kind). 

Track repeat-purchase rate and CLV alongside resolved map pain points to prove ROI and secure future CX budget.

Get the full insight on your customers with Shopify

An effective customer journey map is only as powerful as the data feeding it. Shopify’s unified commerce stack centralizes every store visit, TikTok click-through, and loyalty redemption into one profile to reflect real behaviors on your journey map.

Teams can identify drop-off points faster. Test fixes happen in days rather than quarters. And you can provide ROI with clean KPIs. 

Plus, with features like Shopify Audiences and ship-from-store, you can create personalized customer experiences for every stage, at every moment, with Shopify.