The new rules of ecommerce customer experience

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.

Mistakes happen in ecommerce—packages are delayed or lost, items break in transit, orders get mispacked. When shoppers have a bad experience with a brand, customer service is the first place most of them turn:

• 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. 

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 stop purchasing from a brand after a single negative experience.

Your brand’s ability to meet rising consumer expectations depends on your ability to reduce friction in the customer journey. Ecommerce customer experiences are made up of pre- and post-purchase interactions, so doing that involves making sure post-purchase interactions inform pre-purchase ones and vice versa.

When you’ve implemented this feedback loop, it opens the door for memorable customer experiences like these:

• Someone orders a gift, and they want to check that the order will arrive before their best friend’s birthday. They use the self-serve hub on your website to find shipping and tracking information. At the same time, they’re greeted with welcome points they can put toward a purchase for themself.
• A customer logs in to their account and places an item in their cart, but doesn’t complete the purchase. Your AI customer agent starts a web chat to see if it can help answer any product questions, guiding the customer toward purchase.
• A customer gets an email reminding them that their subscription is about to be renewed. They log in to their account and see an option to upgrade their subscription tier for a discounted price at the tap of a button. 
• Someone leaves a negative review for a new product. Your customer support team receives an automated notification to reach out to the customer personally to offer not only assistance, but also a gift free of charge.

What makes these kinds of smooth experiences possible is the functional integration of marketing and customer service. This unification—between data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer service—is how brands can eliminate many of the points of friction that translate on the consumer side to a clunky customer experience. 

It also leads to real business outcomes. In just two months, for example, Coffee Beanery drove more than $8,000 in revenue with a self-serve customer hub that makes it easy for their customers to quickly solve common problems without involving a customer service agent—all while generating additional revenue for the business.

As Coffee Beanery’s experience makes clear, a big part of creating an excellent ecommerce customer experience is making it easy for customers to self-serve, so they can manage orders and returns without needing to wait for a customer service reply at all.

Officewear brand Ministry of Supply did this when they implemented an on-site self-service customer hub where customers can:

• Manage orders, subscriptions, and accounts
• Browse FAQs and helpful resources
• Discover personalized product recommendations, loyalty rewards, and offers
• Connect with an AI or human agent for support (more on this next)

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.”

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.

This is what makes that last bullet above so important: as soon as a customer’s needs become more complex, they need to be able to escalate their ask to an AI or human customer service agent who can see every interaction that customer has had with the brand.

Importantly, support needs to be available on any channel the customer may be using, whether they’re replying to an email or text message, starting a web chat, or sending a DM on WhatsApp or Instagram.

When your customer service, marketing, and data infrastructure all live under the same roof, your marketing and support teams have visibility into the same context, no matter what channel the customer uses to reach out—empowering them to solve customer problems not only faster, but also more proactively and empathetically.

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.

On that note: remember that 74% of consumers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences in 2025, according to our future of consumer marketing report. 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.

Rogers says 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:

• Self-serve customer hubs that display loyalty points, available rewards, order information, subscription status, and product recommendations
• Homepage experiences tailored to customer hub interactions
• Conversations with AI and human agents that reference full history and context
• 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
• 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.

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 and self-serve options
• Connects customers to an account where they can easily redeem points
• 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 with your broader marketing program. Vaginal health brand Happy V, for example, pulls loyalty program data into their CRM 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 automated flows.

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 reviews, email, and SMS into a single platform, 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 a single quarter, they collected 10% more total reviews.

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. So, don’t sleep on triggering an automatic discount offer after a customer returns an item or leaves a sub-par review.

Brands can also solicit suggestions for improvement: 27% of buyers have returned to a business after being asked for feedback.

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

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 make sure 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.

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, FAQs embedded in your customer hub, a chat with an AI customer agent, or more in-depth competitor comparisons, there are a multitude of ways to counter a price objection that’s more about value than price.

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 CRM built specifically for consumer brands.

Create the ultimate customer experience with the complete Klaviyo Service suite, which includes:

• Customer Hub: a personalized destination where customers can manage orders, redeem offers, discover products, and get support—all in one place
• Klaviyo AI (K:AI) Customer Agent: a 24/7 AI assistant that’s trained on your storefront and customer data to answer questions, recommend products, and resolve issues instantly, across web chat, email, text messaging, and WhatsApp*
• Helpdesk: brings AI and human agents into a unified workspace across email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social, providing full customer context for faster response times and more personalized interactions**

*K:AI Customer Agent is currently available in English. Additional languages will be available in 2026.

**Klaviyo Helpdesk supports two-way conversations in any language, as long as both the customer and agent use the same language. Klaviyo does not translate messages between languages. The Helpdesk interface will appear in the language you’ve selected in your Klaviyo account settings.