How omnichannel for ecommerce creates a seamless shopping experience

Omnichannel is built to accommodate the fluid behavior of online shoppers. Whether a customer discovers a product through email, researches it on your website, and completes the purchase through your mobile app, or signs up for your SMS list through a social campaign and buys directly from a text, an omnichannel approach gives your business complete visibility across the entire shopping journey.

Simply offering multiple channels isn’t enough. Those channels must also work together to create a cohesive shopping experience. Whether it’s product availability, pricing, cart contents, or promotional offers, omnichannel helps customers pick up exactly where they left off. Klaviyo’s 2025 online shopping report found that 45% of millennials and Gen Z expect connected brand experiences across all channels.

The most powerful feature of omnichannel is its ability to tap into sophisticated personalization based on shopping behavior. Because omnichannel platforms unify all customer data—from browsing history to purchase patterns to abandoned carts—brands can create highly targeted experiences that drive conversions, rather than relying on generic, channel-specific messaging.

73% of B2C marketers report rising CACs in 2025, according to our state of B2C marketing report. Clearly, brands need to double down on boosting retention and lifetime value (LTV)—rather than putting all their eggs in the customer acquisition basket. 

With this shift, the fragmented, high-friction approach of multi-channel no longer serves the goals of ecommerce brands. Instead, it’s omnichannel strategies that will deliver the seamless customer experiences that drive repeat purchases, loyalty, and revenue.

Today’s consumers have more ways to engage with ecommerce than ever before. They might discover a product through social media, research it on a mobile app, compare prices on a website, and ultimately make a purchase weeks later through email or even in a physical store.

Despite this growing complexity around the customer journey, our future of consumer marketing report found that 74% of consumers still expect more brands to provide personalized experiences in 2025—and remember, their paths to purchase increasingly span 3+ channels.

Gen Z and millennials, for example, are the most likely to engage across multiple touchpoints—especially mobile apps, social media, and email. Baby boomers tend to prefer in-store and company websites.

The bottom line: people want convenience, consistency, and two-way communication—and multi-channel sometimes can fall short in terms of delivering these expectations.

These days, everything—from our TV shows to our social media feeds—are perfectly tailored to our tastes, thanks to not only the increasing sophistication of data collection, but also the rise of AI. As a result, ecommerce customers have also come to expect this high level of personalization when they shop online.

Multi-channel marketing struggles to deliver because customer data ends up scattered across different platforms. Your email tool doesn’t know what a customer looked at on your website, and your SMS platform can’t see their purchase history. 

Omnichannel strategies, on the other hand, connect the dots across all customer data. And the right platform layers AI across all this unified data to deliver the sophisticated, personalized experiences ecommerce customers expect.

The customer journey is defined by hundreds of different touchpoints that span both online and offline channels. And when a brand can’t connect the dots across all these touchpoints, it leads to: 

• Inconsistent messaging and product availability
• Different prices, discounts, and deals across platforms
• A complete lack of personalization

This inevitably creates frustrating experiences for customers. In fact, when we asked them about their biggest frustration when shopping across different channels, respondents in our future of consumer marketing report ranked inconsistent pricing and promotions as their top complaint, followed by different product availability in different places. 

To effectively create a truly seamless journey for customers, all of your customer data has to live in one location. This requires a customer data platform that serves as a single source of truth and captures every interaction to build complete profiles for every customer. 

Australian customer t-shirt maker Threadheads used Klaviyo to consolidate their online and offline customer data to create a concierge-style online shopping experience. By unifying all their customer data, they were able to create powerful audience segmentation and automation sequences that serve personalized products to customers based on their unique interests.

By sending targeted messages with a personal touch, powered by Klaviyo’s centralized data platform, Threadheads grew their annual revenue by 6,400% in less than 3 years.

Brands often make the mistake of treating customers as either “an email person” or an “SMS person” and using that assumption to focus heavily on just one channel. But this isn’t true omnichannel—and remember, it’s not how customers actually shop.  

Customers engage across multiple touchpoints and expect their experience to be consistent and connected—regardless of which channel they’re using at any given moment.

True omnichannel orchestration means understanding each customer’s individual channel preferences and timing their messages accordingly, rather than blasting the same content across every platform. This requires the right technology.

For example, Klaviyo’s AI-powered channel affinity tracks real-time engagement patterns to orchestrate campaigns across the right channels at the right time. The feature analyzes customer engagement patterns and predicts and ranks their channel preferences across email, SMS, and mobile push. This helps marketers run omnichannel campaigns and flows with just the right mix of channels based on user preferences and likelihood for engagement. 

Loop Earplugs used Klaviyo as their central database to consolidate their email, SMS, and WhatsApp data, which then allowed them to measure each channels’ performance in different countries and take a more localized approach to their omnichannel marketing strategies. 

This ultimately contributed to a 46 times greater ROI in the first full 2 quarters on the Klaviyo platform, highlighting the effectiveness of orchestrating marketing across diverse channels. 

Many brands are still playing it safe, only using AI for basic tasks like chatbots or subject line generation. That’s why it’s critical for ecommerce brands to invest in an omnichannel solution that uses built-in AI features like these to power the entire customer experience: 

• Predictive analytics that can forecast everything from next order date to churn risk 
• Personalized product recommendations for each customer, based on their purchase history and other interactions with your brand 
• Benchmarks to compare performance against competitors in your industry
• Feedback analysis to help you understand what customers are loving (or not)
• Help generating flows, segments, campaigns, and even responses to reviews 

Before Klaviyo, seafood brand Svenfish sent discounts to their whole list. Segmentation in their previous email platform was a high-friction process.

Now, with Klaviyo, they can offer discounts only to disengaged customers who haven’t bought for 3+ months, or use Klaviyo’s AI-powered predictive analytics to reward high-value customers whose forecasted customer lifetime value is above $200.

This has helped Svenfish shrink their win-back segment and improve margins. Today, 70% of their YTD ecommerce revenue is attributable to Klaviyo.

Because of the complex nature of the ecommerce customer journey, attribution has never been more challenging—especially with disjointed platforms leading to inaccurate insights.

The downside? Without understanding marketing attribution at a deep level, ecommerce brands might over-invest in channels that appear to be driving sales but are actually just the final touchpoint in a longer journey. Similarly, you might under-invest in channels that were critical to the customer’s purchasing decision. 

When you’re using 6–15 platforms in your tech stack and each one reports its own version of success, it’s impossible to understand what to actually credit for a conversion. You’re left with inflated numbers and no clear picture of what’s actually driving results.

Klaviyo’s attribution solves this by providing multi-touch attribution across all channels in a single view, with customizable attribution models and retroactive updates that ensure accurate reporting as customer journeys evolve. This unified measurement approach helps brands understand the true customer journey and optimize their omnichannel strategy based on real performance data rather than siloed channel metrics.

Happy Wax, a flame-free home fragrance system, used to run their email, SMS, and reviews on 3 separate platforms, which made it hard to track attribution. As a result, their revenue numbers were inaccurate and they had no idea which channels were contributing to conversions. 

Consolidating all 3 channels into Klaviyo not only reduced the cost of all 3 channels by 10%+. The new consolidated set-up is also significantly easier to use and provides much clearer attribution—helping the brand understand exactly what’s driving their success. 

• Evening is the most popular time for consumers to engage with beauty brands, with 28% of all respondents selecting this option. 
• Gen Z overwhelmingly prefers social media (33%) and branded mobile apps (30%) for browsing, clearly indicating a strong digital-first inclination for discovery.
• When it comes to staying in touch with beauty brands, email is the dominant channel for consumers, with 40% of all respondents selecting it as their preferred method.

Putting these insights into action: Lean into email for ongoing communications with customers, and experiment with sending more during the evening. Consider layering in tactics like social retargeting and in-app notifications for your younger consumers, especially if they haven’t yet purchased with your brand. 

• Gen Z is more likely than other generations to engage with home goods brands at work (14%) and late at night (12%), whereas boomers prefer mornings (31%).
• Email is the overall most preferred channel for consumers to keep up with home goods offers (33%), but younger generations lean into digital messaging. 
• Specifically, Gen Z shows a higher likelihood to engage over SMS (13%) and WhatsApp (7%), and millennials favor social media (16%) and push notifications (10%) for these communications.

Putting these insights into action: Consider staggering your send times based on demographic segments, and be mindful of choosing the right channels to keep in touch with customers depending on their preferences. Use a tool like Klaviyo’s AI-powered channel affinity to make delivering the right message on the preferred channels for your consumers less manual for your marketers. 

• Evening is the most popular time for consumers to engage with fashion and apparel, with 31% of respondents selecting this option. Gen Z is unique: 28% prefer late afternoon engagement.
• Email is also the preferred channel for consumers to keep up with fashion and apparel offers (38%). Millennials show the highest likelihood of making email-driven impulse purchases (22%).
• While digital channels are crucial for browsing, in-store shopping remains the top channel for actual purchasing, with 33% of all respondents selecting it as their primary method.

Putting these insights into action: Lean on email and SMS for broad appeal and to drive customers in-store. Consider using these channels specifically to target millennials with more urgent discounts or sales, or to target Gen Z with communications later in the afternoon. Use Klaviyo’s multi-channel flows and channel affinity to create email, SMS and WhatsApp flows based on behavior triggers (e.g. price drops, abandonment cards) to meet users where they are. 

• Gen X shows the strongest preference for engaging with electronics brands in the evening (37%), while boomers are more likely to engage in the morning (30%) than any other generation. Gen Z stands out for engaging at work (17%)
• Women are more likely than men to browse electronics in-store (30% vs. 23%) and via company websites (33% vs. 29%), whereas men show a higher preference for marketplaces (19% vs. 12%) and social media (12% vs. 9%).

Putting these insights into action: Consider staggering send times according to demographic information, and adjust your omnichannel approach to take the preferences of women vs. men into account.