The new rules of ecommerce customer experience

Economic conditions and price sensitivity

According to our research, 34% of buyers most commonly abandon carts due to finding a better price elsewhere, while 15% are caught off-guard by unexpectedly high fees or taxes. Another 12% say they wait for sales and discounts to purchase.

For 37% of consumers, meanwhile, economic conditions have pushed them to look for more discounts from their favorite brands in the last 6 months. The same proportion will continue to do so in the next 6 months.

Finally, 39% of consumers say that personalized discounts or promotions is the type of personalization that matters most when deciding to purchase from a brand they’ve already bought from in the past. This is an opportunity for brands: a discount strategy tailored to purchase history can generate additional sales.

What consumers expect from customer service teams

Mistakes happen in ecommerce—packages are delayed or lost, items break in transit, orders get mispacked. When shoppers have a negative experience with a brand, customer service is the first place most of them turn. Here’s what they expect from it:

• 43% expect a response from the brand within 24 hours.
• 16% expect a response within 4 hours.
• 22% want a response within 1 hour.
• 11% want to hear back in just 30 minutes.

Your brand’s ability to meet these expectations depends on your resources. But all brands can set appropriate expectations with customers—for example, sending an automated email as soon as customers create a support ticket to let them know your typical response time.

8 ways to improve your ecommerce customer experience

1. Personalize your customer experience

A whopping 74% of consumers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences in 2025. High earners with an annual income exceeding $100,000 and buyers who spend over $100 on a typical ecommerce purchase are even more likely to expect personalization than lower earners or spenders.

Fortunately, many consumers are willing to share personal information in exchange for personalization: 33% will share their email addresses, 15% will share their purchase history, 11% will share their browsing history, and 11% will share their phone number.

Rogers says that more of his clients are approaching the ecommerce customer experience on an “account-first” basis, and he expects this to become an industry standard. That level of personalization might look like:

• Product recommendations based on website browsing and stated preferences
• Special offers for discount shoppers
• Limited-time offers for SMS subscribers
• Special access to new products for VIP customers
• Order confirmations followed up by product education guides
• Replenishment reminders timed to product usage patterns
• Account dashboards that show loyalty points, available rewards, or subscription status
• Homepage experiences tailored to customers vs. non-customers
• Discounts for high-value cart abandonment or disengaged customers

When dog gear brand Ruffwear, for example, wanted fresh insight into disengaged customers, they integrated RFM analysis into their re-engagement flows. Now, if a customer enters the “Needs attention” or “At risk” RFM segments, it triggers a retention flow. Personalized based on purchase history, the flow content recommends bestsellers the customer hasn’t yet bought.

In just 6 months, Ruffwear’s discount rate—the ratio of discounts to sales—dropped 10% YoY, while overall revenue grew 9%. “Getting the right discounts to the right people at the right time gives us better margins,” says Ernie Kucera, digital marketing manager at Ruffwear.

2. Keep the customer experience consistent across channels

Remember, consumers get frustrated when you give them a different customer experience on different channels. When you manage it right, a personalized, consistent omnichannel marketing strategy that caters to customer preferences can pay serious dividends.

Case in point: by consolidating email and SMS marketing in the same platform, Filson, a heritage brand that produces outdoor gear and apparel, opened up new possibilities for consistent cross-channel communication with their customers, including:

• Using unified data to craft a better experience for people who subscribe to both email and SMS
• Sending fewer redundant messages
• Lowering unsubscribe rates—and growing SMS revenue 3.5x YoY

“Email and SMS are really where we make 1:1 digital connections with customers. It’s essential to avoid messages that make our subscribers think, ‘Filson doesn’t know me,’” says Mike Swanson, retention marketing manager at Filson.

“If we have all the data across systems in Klaviyo, and we know how people are interacting with the brand both positively and negatively, whether that’s through customer service or a retail store, we can create a seamless omnichannel experience that feels personalized—and drive more revenue,” Swanson explains.

3. Address quality issues head on

According to our research, 33% of customers say that consistent product quality keeps them loyal to their favorite brands. Another 21% prioritize quality of customer service.

Consumers aren’t completely unforgiving of mistakes, but they’ll take their business elsewhere if they sense that subpar quality is the norm: 1 in 5 consumers will simply stop purchasing from a brand after a negative experience.

The message for brands is clear: keep up with product QA to make sure that your reliable, consistent experience doesn’t suddenly fall short.

4. Strategically drive loyalty program engagement

Once you win a first-time buyer, the real work begins. With customer acquisition costs higher than ever, brands should invest in loyalty programs to nurture repeat shoppers. Nearly half of consumers (46%) participate in multiple programs, and another 26% participate in at least one. Only 11% have never engaged with a loyalty program.

Loyalty programs don’t just drive sales and retention—they build community and open a direct dialogue between your brand and your customers. “The biggest trend of high-growth brands over the last few years has been community—building advocacy across customers, increasing touchpoints with clients, and growing engagement across key channels,” says Rogers.

As a reminder, a good loyalty program:

• Identifies brand enthusiasts and encourages them to join your program
• Encourages customers to share your loyalty program
• Keeps loyal customers engaged with valuable educational content
• Focuses on growing a community
• Rewards loyalty with exclusive perks and early access to promotions
• Personalizes the loyalty experience to a customer’s preferences

It also integrates seamlessly with your broader marketing program. Vaginal health brand Happy V, for example, pulls loyalty program data into Klaviyo via a pre-built integration, and sends 7 loyalty-triggered flows—several of which are in their top 10 most revenue-driving automations. They also send quarterly campaigns to the segment of subscribers with 100+ points, reminding them to redeem.

All of the above is partly responsible for 6.6x YoY growth in loyalty points redemptions attributed to Klaviyo flows. “Klaviyo integrations are very seamless,” says Lydia Di Capua, head of retention and CX at Happy V. “We didn’t need developer support to set them up, and we were able to clone all our loyalty flows into our Klaviyo, and build off of that.”

5. Make the most of second chances after negative experiences

Mistakes that lead to negative customer experiences are inevitable. What separates good brands from great brands is how they behave in the aftermath.

Our research reveals that 50% of consumers will give brands a second chance if they receive compensation or a refund after an error. Brands can also solicit suggestions for improvement—27% of buyers have returned to a business after being asked for feedback.

Outstanding customer service, of course, helps too: 25% of buyers say that an exceptional customer experience interaction has changed their mind.

6. Time review requests appropriately

Customer reviews are a powerful way to influence new buyers, but it’s not enough just to ask for reviews. Brands seeking feedback should time their requests to reflect a product’s time to value.

“There are so many times we come onto a client account and they have their review request triggered by the ‘placed order’ metric and not the ‘order delivered’ metric,” says Erikson. “At that point, something could have happened in the shipment, but you end up with a bad review that has nothing to do with the product.”

Similarly, “it takes a month for people to start to see results with certain skincare products,” Erikson points out. “If brands have the review request going out 5 days after, all they’re going to get is a review on if the product smells nice or the packaging, but not about the actual results.”

This is why it’s so important to understand the time to value for various products, and send requests for reviews accordingly. Otherwise, if you do receive reviews, you’re at risk of receiving irrelevant feedback that won’t help buyers understand your product’s value.

When the team at Compass Coffee was trying to build their reviews pipeline, their clunky reviews solution sent out an automated review request email a fixed number of days after an order was placed. There was no way to customize the experience for delayed or lost orders.

By consolidating their reviews tech in Klaviyo, the same platform as their email and SMS marketing, Compass is now able to customize the trigger for their review request flow so it only goes out after an order has been delivered. In their first quarter with Klaviyo Reviews, Compass collected 10% more total reviews.

“Klaviyo wins on the customizability of the review collection correspondence,” says Joel Shetterly, CMO at Compass Coffee. “The rate of review collection is completely solved; the rate of photo collection is completely solved.”

7. Highlight brand values and data privacy

42% of buyers say that a brand’s values matter more to them than they did a year ago.

With an ever-shifting data privacy landscape and the advent of legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), consumers want to know that brands will keep their data secure.

In our survey, consumers ranked “strong policies on data security” as the brand value that matters most to them when deciding whether to shop with a brand. Fair labor practices, commitment to supporting local and small businesses, and sustainability are other values consumers care about.

The name of the game here is transparency. Invest in brand storytelling, and ensure data policies are easily accessible on your website. Gather first-party data directly from your customers and manage your data in a secure platform, like Klaviyo B2C CRM, to maintain customer trust and data compliance.

8. Educate your customers on how to get the most value from your products

With continued economic uncertainty, consumers are more price-sensitive than ever. 25% of buyers say that competitive pricing and discounts are the biggest factor they consider when shopping with a brand for the first time—and that number ticks up to 29% when evaluating whether to return to a brand.

The challenge worth taking on is educating people about the value they’re getting.

• Is your product manufactured with higher-quality materials?
• Does it last 50% longer than a cheaper competitor’s?
• Does it have a wider range of functionality?
• Do you have a better warranty policy, or provide superior customer service?

Let your buyers know. 

Whether it’s through better data points on product pages, tutorials for proper use, or more in-depth competitor comparisons, there are a multitude of ways to counter a price objection that’s more about value than price.

9. Make customer service available everywhere

21% of consumers say high-quality customer service keeps them coming back to ecommerce brands. Like it or not, product quality just isn’t enough to create loyal customers—your buyers must be able to get the support they need, when they need it.

Add access points anywhere customers interact with your brand. Your Instagram DMs are just as valuable a customer service channel as your website, and AI chatbots can take on answering simple, common questions so your agents can focus on more complex inquiries.

You can also provide better self-serve options to empower customers to solve problems on their own. Officewear brand Ministry of Supply did this when they implemented Klaviyo Customer Hub, an on-site dashboard displaying:

• The customer’s recently viewed items
• Their order history, with product-page links for convenient repurchasing
• Their order tracking information
• Personalized product recommendations, powered by Klaviyo AI
• …and more

In less than 4 months, Ministry of Supply account holders performed 650+ self-serve support interactions, and CEO Aman Advani noticed fewer escalated support tickets from customers requesting basic information.

“We see Klaviyo Customer Hub becoming what we think of as the future of shopping—a very curated one-to-one experience, unlike traditional ecomm, which is one to many,” Advani explains. “It’s not just our customer service tool—it’s one-to-one access to Ministry of Supply. That’s really powerful.”

The best ecommerce customer experiences are powered by the CRM built for B2C brands

The modern ecommerce experience is an intricate web of interactions that shape brand perception, loyalty, and lifetime value. Memorable experiences are rooted in personalized, omnichannel interactions that feel completely integrated and cohesive.

The best way to build personalized relationships with customers at scale is with a CRM built specifically for B2C businesses.

“Having everything in one place is a game changer,” says Rachel Fagan, VP of marketing at Happy Wax. “Everything is just so much more tailored to the customer, which then increases loyalty, increases purchase frequency, and will also affect our lifetime value.”

Ecommerce brands need a CRM built to handle the volume of data, transactions, and personalization needed to deliver a stellar experience at every stage of the customer journey. Klaviyo B2C CRM is the first and only CRM built specifically for consumer brands.