Averages are interesting, but not particularly helpful. There will be enormous variation depending on what’s being purchased and why. Something like a car or expensive furniture may have a long lead time. Apparel is likely to be significantly less. What is certain is that people do more research and take longer to buy than they did 10 years ago, and they use more touch points. That means there’s a lot more areas where retailers need to reduce friction.

This is a sort of bizarre question. I mean the true answer is “It depends.” There are items we just buy, because they are, as my friend Nikki Baird describes them, “low consideration items.” Higher consideration items (which by my definition are ones that are all around higher priced and have more important utility) certainly have a longer path to purchase. Is it longer than it used to be? It might be shorter, really. After all, we can find out a lot more about products more quickly than in pre-internet days. But it is certainly a chaotic process, meaning it’s random. Back and forth between digital and physical channels. Then there’s fashion, which is very bifurcated, with fast fashion being just that – fast, and things like jewelry, or more expensive wardrobe “staples” taking longer. Retailers need to have consistency across all touch points, as Chris points out. Beyond that, I think we just have more data than we used to. And don’t assume you need to drop prices to goose the process.

I look at it through the lens of knowns and unknowns. For knowns, for replenishment or replacement purchases, I have to believe the journey is shorter. A couple of clicks and you’re done. For unknowns, where some homework and research is called for, I have to believe the journey is longer, maybe much longer, and maybe to the point of too much information. Retailers and brands have to be more succinct and focused in their communication than ever.

Clearly biased towards higher-priced items. Most of what we buy day in and day out is grocery and there’s probably a trivial, if any, purchase journey there.

The path to purchase is as dynamic as ever as we are dealing with a channel-less consumer who wants to shop, engage and buy on their own terms. It’s extremely challenging to make a broad generalization about how long the customer journey is, as it varies significantly across every retail segment.

It’s clear that an optimized digital experience will lead to broader brand engagement, as well as the potential to draw the consumer to the physical stores or showrooms. With the emergence of the shop now capabilities on Instagram, and the Amazon marketplace the path to purchase is only increasing in complexity.

The traditional customer journey maps are things of the past. It’s the digital-first consumer that is driving the market to become more agile, flexible, responsive and adjust the strategies to the new customer journeys.

This very much depends on the product and the single biggest factor is the overall price – the bigger the investment the longer the journey. Compare a car to a new power cable for your phone.
However as consumers become more informed they are getting longer and undoubtedly more complex. Myself and my colleagues have done a lot of work helping retailers map customer journeys using input from process mining in order to identify points of friction that can be improved. Often a point of friction for the customer is also a hidden cost for the retailer so it is critical to understand from an outside-in as well as an inside-out perspective.

I agree with the previous comments that this question (as can be shown by the wide variance in answers) is much too broad. Industry or product specific research would be much more helpful, and if I were running it I would be interested to see if there was a difference in the shopping cycle based on where the journey began – i.e. do consumers who begin their interactions on social channels have a quicker turnaround time than those starting from search engines or in-store?

As customer expectations have changed due to additional shopping options with more competitive pricing, greater merchandise assortments and faster delivery to get the desired product where and when she needs it, the customer journey has become more complicated and varied than ever before. Consumers now start and stop their shopping journey in different channels, including online marketplaces and social media, and frequently shop for the same product across different retailers, both online and in the store. The path to purchase varies by consumer and type of product being purchased so it is difficult to determine.

Consumers expect a frictionless shopping experience across an entire brand and they don’t want disruptions as they cross individual channels or locations. Consumers also expect their experience to be seamless as their “shopping cart” and browsing history follows them throughout their journey. To adapt to this expanded shopping journey, retailers must transform their customer engagement models.

As retailers shift to operating as a platform (Lululemon being a recent practical example), the journey is not and should not be thought of as linear.

I know this may make me sound like the old philosopher, but the duration of the shopper journey is life-long. It’s an endless meander with numerous stops, starts, influences, diversions and decision points along the way. Too many product marketers seem to begin their analyses at the end point (a sale) and work backward as if the path to glory was a linear one. That leads to a skewed and oversimplified perspective, I think. There are some high-consideration purchases, to be sure, that shoppers begin with “I want/need a…” (fill in the blank: new flat screen TV, outfit for a party, holiday turkey) and pursue a single-minded shopping process. Those decisions are always influenced by pre-existing brand biases, prior experiences, ads, reviews, recommendations and self-image. Low-consideration purchases, like grocery and household products, may seem perfunctory, but in fact the influences may go back to what our parents’ preferred, or maybe a series of direct product experiences that date back years or even decades. Marketers often have no way of knowing about these powerful forces, or… Read more »