A Connected Retail Journey Does Not Need More Touchpoints

Retailers have spent years trying to remove friction from the customer journey. The newest wave of commerce research makes that aim harder, not simpler. Customers may encounter a brand through social content, search, a marketplace, an AI tool, reviews, a store visit or a recommendation from somebody they know. Their route is neither tidy nor wholly visible.

IMRG and Columbus’s newly published *Connected Consumer* research is timely because it puts trust, confidence and friction alongside AI-led discovery. That is a more useful framing than treating channel expansion as a race to be present everywhere.

The connected journey is often mistaken for a technology ambition: one customer record, one view of stock, one set of messages across every surface. Those capabilities matter. But the commercial question is narrower and more human: at which point does a customer have enough confidence to proceed, and what prevents that confidence from carrying into the next step?

Key takeaways

• Map purchase journeys around decision moments — comparison, reassurance, availability, delivery and returns — rather than around the channels a business owns.

• Treat incomplete, inconsistent or hard-to-find product information as a demand problem, not merely a content-management issue.

• Separate discovery metrics from confidence metrics. Attention may bring a shopper to a product, but evidence of suitability is what permits a decision.

• Use research to identify the hand-offs where customers restart their evaluation, rather than assuming a completed click represents a settled preference.

More touchpoints can produce less understanding

The temptation is to respond to fragmentation with more activity: more retail-media placements, more creator partnerships, more conversational tools and more personalised prompts. That may extend reach, but it can also make the journey harder to interpret.

A customer who sees a product in a video, checks its reviews, asks an AI assistant to compare alternatives and then visits a retailer’s site has not followed four separate funnels. They have pursued one unresolved question through several sources.

That distinction changes the research brief. A conventional channel-attribution exercise may identify the last measurable interaction before purchase. It is much less likely to reveal why the shopper sought a second opinion, what claim they needed verified or whether they abandoned a preferred option because a key detail was absent.

There is still a case for coherent cross-channel presence. An IPA article drawing on Ipsos advertising-tracking data notes that people recognising a campaign across five or more media channels showed higher intention to act. But recognition is not the same as resolution. Repetition can make a brand familiar; it cannot compensate for unclear specifications, inconsistent prices, uncertain delivery promises or reviews that raise questions the product page does not answer.

The point is not to dismiss broad media investment. It is to avoid confusing media continuity with customer confidence.

Product information is becoming part of the experience

This matters more as AI tools and marketplaces take a larger role in early exploration. In those environments, a brand has less control over the sequence of information and fewer opportunities to explain itself at length. Product facts, attributes, imagery, availability and service terms need to stand up before a customer reaches the brand’s own site — and continue to match what they find there.

GS1 UK’s work on standardised product data reflects a practical shift in what counts as customer experience. Information on ingredients, dimensions, compatibility, sustainability or suitability is not peripheral when it is the basis on which people compare options. If it is missing or contradictory, the customer does not experience a minor data flaw. They experience uncertainty.

Retailers should therefore investigate product-information failures in the same way they investigate checkout abandonment. Which details trigger customer-service contact? Which categories create the most comparison behaviour? Where do shoppers leave to look elsewhere? What information do store colleagues repeatedly have to supply because the digital journey did not?

These are not questions that a dashboard alone will answer. They need behavioural data, search and site-query analysis, customer-service evidence and qualitative work that reconstructs the decision in context.

Research should follow the unresolved question

The familiar journey map remains useful, but it needs refreshing. Rather than plotting an ideal sequence from awareness to conversion, insight teams should identify recurring customer questions: “Will this work for my situation?” “Is this genuinely better value?” “Can I trust the claim?” “What happens if it is wrong?”

Those questions can then be tracked across channels. The value of a review, a store visit or a chatbot is not that it belongs to a fashionable touchpoint. Its value is whether it answers the question better than the alternative.

This also creates a more rigorous definition of connected commerce. It is not a seamless journey in which every interaction looks the same. Customers do not necessarily want that, and businesses cannot realistically deliver it across every external platform. It is a journey in which the essential facts, promises and next actions remain coherent when customers move between places.

For retailers, that is a more manageable ambition. The aim is not omnipresence. It is to know where confidence is lost, what evidence restores it and which parts of the experience deserve investment as a result.