Customer Shopping Experience: 2025 Essentials

The consumer shopping experience has evolved immensely over the last 48 months. The impact of new features that simplify, speed up, and personalize the shopping experience have begun to create new demands for ease and convenience when purchasing products.

No matter the commerce vertical, user device, or payment method, roughly 85% of consumers will either make or break a purchase decision based on the new shopping trends below.

Let’s start from the very beginning of the typical shopping experience. Consumers typically initiate the purchase process with research; finding brands, products, and weighing the benefits and features.

Surprisingly enough, 68% of consumers initiate their shopping process by conducting research using search engines on a desktop device. On the contrary, 60% of online purchases are made from a mobile device, which suggests research is made separately altogether; different time, place, and platform.

Dozens of elements impact not only the purchase experience, but the process as well.

The growing influence that social media has on purchase decisions became abundantly evident in 2024, as TikTok proved how effective and seemingly reliable social media personalities became when featuring products in their videos.

Over 76% of consumers not only use social media to research products, but specifically watch influencer tutorials, reviews, and transparent information before purchasing a product.

The growing importance of accessible product information became explosively evident, as over 98% of consumers made their purchase decision solely based on customer reviews, whether in the format of video, text, photo, or otherwise.

2024 proclaimed a staple of elements that determine the decision-making outcome of consumers internationally.

Starting with the most important consumer behavior statistic for purchases; 70% of initial orders were abandoned before completing the purchase in 2024, leaving an enormous $18 billion in lost sales revenue across the entire retail industry.

According to consumers, the most decisive checkout functions and features are listed below.

The most impactful checkout features prove to show just how essential convenience, ease, and costs have to do with consumer purchase decisions around the globe.

The 70% abandoned cart rate industry-wide was heavily impacted by the simplicity of each brand’s checkout process. Checkout processes who met the following criteria saw a 22% decrease in abandoned cart rate:

• Checkout process 3-steps long or less

• FREE delivery

• No extra costs or hidden fees

• Two-day shipping

• Easy, free return policy

• Buy Now, Pay Later payment option available

Brands with all of these checkout features saw 22% less orders abandoned before purchase, which equates to a total potential sales revenue of $3.96 billion dollars recovered industry-wide.

Keeping a simplified checkout experience in mind, brands must also consider expanding the personalization of every step, offer, creative content piece, throughout every channel.

Over 72% of consumers have signed up for a Rewards Program and opted-in for email & SMS marketing to receive bigger savings and exclusive, personalized offers.

Consumers have made their desires clear, as 84% state they would be willing to download a mobile app just to receive bigger savings. Over 70% of consumers have already opted-in to receive extra offers for savings via email and SMS marketing.

That majority of consumers illustrates just how important (and easy) it should be not only to retain customers, but to accelerate your brand’s repeat purchase rate and skyrocket your customer lifetime value with personalized upsell and down-sell offers.

To bring the purchase experience full-circle, there is extensive opportunity to turn new purchases into loyal customers with a vast variety of personalized offers, exclusive savings, and huge one-time deals.

Brands that master convenience, ease, and personalization evolve purchases into brand loyalty by simply expanding upon each of these 5 elements.

The use of social media and branding makes expansion in today’s world multi-versatile and essential for growing your brand’s online commerce.

Stay tuned for our next bite-sized report on social media commerce specifically.