Why is online customer experience more important than ever?

Online customer experience determines the success of your business. If you’re an e-tailer, you know that a single mistake can be enough to drive a buyer away. In fact, almost 85% of consumers stop buying after a bad online shopping experience. If you haven’t already done so, it’s high time to optimize your digital customer journey, especially in a post-Covid context where buying habits have changed for good. Before the health crisis, online shoppers focused on price and speed of delivery. Today, 61% of consumers¹ rank the quality of customer service as the most important factor in their purchasing decisions. What does this prove? That the customer experience is now a powerful sales lever. If you don’t optimize it, you run the risk of missing out on sales and just as many customers. So, what are the new codes of online customer experience? And above all, how can you integrate them into your e-commerce business? Let’s find out

Online vs. in-store customer experience: what are the differences?

Customer experience (CX) is the overall perception a buyer has of your brand throughout their interaction with your store. In a physical outlet, this experience is based on tangible elements: welcome, human contact, advice, ambience or product testing. On the web, however, it’s all done through digital interfaces and virtual interactions, which profoundly changes the game. Online, this physical contact doesn’t exist, which can make the shopping experience impersonal, and this is all the more the case on marketplaces due to the uniformity of stores. As an e-tailer, your challenge is to compensate for this lack of direct contact with a fluid, reassuring and engaging user experience. Today’s buyers expect :

• Clear information.
• Fast exchanges.
• Personalized options.
• A fluid user interface, from landing page to checkout.

Please note: each channel has its strengths and limitations. A physical store offers direct contact, while an e-commerce platform offers greater freedom and immediacy. A store is also limited by its opening hours, logistical constraints and queues, whereas an online presence guarantees 24/7 access.

Why is it essential to optimize your online customer experience?

E-commerce customer experience, or marketplace customer experience, is not just about satisfying a one-off need: it has a tangible impact on your long-term sales performance. In fact, 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for an excellent online customer experience². What’s more, a satisfied customer is a loyal customer, and that makes a real difference to your sales performance. A study by Harvard Business Review³ proves it: a 5% increase in the loyalty rate can generate up to 95% additional profits.

When there’s no physical contact, the website or marketplace becomes the only point of interaction with the buyer. So everything must inspire confidence. This means careful visuals, authentic customer reviews, smooth navigation, clear delivery times and accessible customer service. If you can do this, here’s what you’ll achieve:

• Better conversion and fewer shopping cart abandonments.
• Improved customer loyalty and higher average shopping basket.
• Positive word-of-mouth, with more reviews, recommendations and ratings on the platform.
• Enhanced visibility, especially if you’re present on a marketplace like Rakuten, where your Merchant Quality Score influences the placement of your products on the BuyBox.

Note: customer demands have evolved. They now want responsiveness, clarity and control at every stage of the buying journey

What are the trends in online customer experience?

In e-commerce,customer experience doesn’t follow a single model. To stay competitive, you need to know your customers inside out. Remember that expectations can vary according to :

• The type of customer (persona): a young urbanite in a hurry, a housewife, a retiree or a high-tech equipment enthusiast do not have the same expectations.
• Type of product: a ready-to-wear purchase does not require the same level of reassurance as the purchase of a luxury item.
• Time of purchase: during certain periods, such as sales, customers may accept longer delivery times.
• Your brand image: the more upscale your brand is perceived to be, the more demanding the requirements.

Faced with this diversity of behaviors, you need to know your customer base inside and out, so you can continuously adjust your purchasing path. In 2025, you can rely on several innovations to upgrade your customer experience and stay competitive:

• Advanced personalization options: product, content or offer recommendations tailored to the customer’s profile and buying behavior.
• Omnichannel journey: offer a consistent experience across all channels (website, app, social networks, point of sale).
• Self-service customer service: with easy access to dynamic FAQs or help centers to resolve problems without human contact.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): intelligent search engines, 24/7 chatbots and predictive analytics to anticipate needs.

While practical, these developments reflect a strong expectation on the part of consumers: greater simplicity, more autonomy and more responsive customer service, whatever the channel used.

Fragmentation of the purchasing path

The digital customer journey is now segmented into several stages. Indeed, a buyer may discover a product via an advert on Instagram, read reviews on a forum, compare prices on a marketplace, buy on another platform… then pick up their order at a pickup point or in-store. Your role in following this path is therefore to propose a navigation that is all the more fluid and intuitive, including:

• A clear user interface with visible CTAs.
• A high-performance search engine to find the right product quickly.
• Intelligent recommendations based on visitor behavior.
• A frictionless checkout: a sales tunnel with as few steps as possible.

Mobile at the heart of the online customer experience

Today, the mobile is the main point of entry in the customer journey. In fact, 74% of e-commerce purchases worldwide are made via smartphone⁴. And this figure continues to grow, particularly among buyers aged 18-35. To remain successful, your store must therefore offer an impeccable experience on mobile with :

• A responsive site or Progressive Web App (PWA).
• Fast loading, even with 4G.
• Navigation adapted to small screens.
• A simplified purchasing tunnel, with no unnecessary distractions.

Please note: With a poorly optimized site for mobile, you’ll miss out on many sales. With a few simple steps (content optimization, right image dimensions), you can already improve your mobile customer experience.

The importance of personalization in the online customer experience

What your buyers are looking for in 2025 is a tailor-made customer experience. That’s why personalizing your buying journey is essential today. Consumers want targeted messages, relevant suggestions and personalized shopping paths. They expect an experience that recognizes their preferences and rewards their loyalty. And unsurprisingly, it all starts with the very first navigation, with:

Note: you can easily implement these actions by exploiting your customer data (cookies, purchase history, browsing, abandoned baskets…). But there are limits to what you can do. Only collect useful data, systematically ask for your customers’ consent before soliciting them (GDPR requirement) and always leave the user in control of what they receive.

A well-thought-out and properly implemented strategy is capable of significantly improving customer satisfaction and generating more repeat purchases.

How does AI affect the customer experience?

In 2025, artificial intelligence will add a new dimension to theonline customer experience. Its role: to intervene at every stage of the customer journey, with, for example:

• Intelligent search engines that suggest the right items even with approximate queries.
• Predictive AI that anticipates a customer’s needs and suggests the right offers at the right time.
• Automated data cleansing and segmentation by AI directly in your CRM, for more targeted and effective campaigns.

On the customer service side, AI complements the human and takes over many tasks. An intelligent chatbot can handle simple questions 24/7, freeing up your teams for more complex cases. In practice, an AI-assisted agent receives a summary of the customer file before even taking over, saving precious time

The benefits for your store are many: constant availability, faster service and large-scale customization. But be aware of AI’s limits:

• Risk of dehumanization if AI completely replaces human contact.
• Importance of transparency: always inform your customers that they are interacting with a bot.
• Management of sensitive data: the data collected and used by your AI assistants must remain GDPR-compliant.

Rakuten France’s conviction is that AI is indeed a strategic asset, but this tool must always remain at the service of humans, and work in tandem with real e-commerce experts.

As you can see, today, the online customer experience is a strategic lever that constitutes much more than a simple marketing asset. Whether you’re a seller on the Rakuten marketplace or an independent e-tailer, you have the means to act on every step of the journey to transform the purchase into a relationship. Make the most of it!

Sources:
¹Qualtrics, Top consumer experience trends for 2024
²Alma, Expérience client e-commerce
³Harvard Business Review, E-loyalty: your secret weapon on the web
⁴ Fevad, Les chiffres sur le mobile commerce