Another change in e-commerce product sales will be the sales channel. "Your customer doesn't think in channels," says Marc Gasser, CEO of Pedalix AG. What is important when considering the points of contact is the so-called customer journey.
Where are the points of contact with the customer? This is the question you have to ask yourself.
The customer journey reflects all of the customer's touchpoints and represents, so to speak, a gathering of information. This information is to be used for the benefit of the customer's needs in order to support him in the buying process.
This so-called "customer-centric marketing" is started with a detailed analysis and ends in the best case with the completion of the purchase process (Gasser, 2017, para. 2). A process until the final purchase can take weeks.
Influencing factors can be e- newsletters or online advertising. The customer journey can be divided into two dimensions: Purchase Impulse and Touchpoints. "It is difficult to depict the dependencies between different advertising contacts, because not everything on a customer's path to a purchase decision can be measured" (Heinemann, 2017, p. 56).
The following illustration shows a possible course of a downstream customer interaction (downstream: all interactive activities after completion of the product) in the customer journey:
Typical downstream customer interaction in the customer journey (figure taken from Heinemann, 2017, p. 56).
Bringing the online and offline worlds together is relevant in the customer journey and requires qualified data collection (Heinemann, 2017, p. 56).