From discovery to delivery: why CX is the new battleground in eCommerce

A beautiful site and good products used to be enough. In 2025 they are the entry fee.

Winning in eCommerce now means winning on customer experience, and that goes well beyond checkout — discovery, personalisation, delivery, returns, and every gap in between. The brands standing out are the ones treating experience as a product in its own right: something they build, measure and improve, and something that could only be theirs.

We are lucky to work with a few of them. Here is what they are getting right.

Discovery is everything

Search bars and filters are useful, but they are not the story. Shoppers expect the site to guide them — smart recommendations, editorial content, curated collections, and a search that understands what they meant rather than what they typed.

LeMieux is a good example. Sizing guides, colour-matched product bundles, a discovery experience pitched squarely at people who know what they are looking at. They are not just selling riding gear; they are building a space where equestrian customers feel understood.

Worth trying: look past traditional navigation. AI-driven recommendations, content and commerce in the same journey, search that adapts to behaviour.

Your site should feel like your brand

You can spot an Oliver Bonas product across a room, and the website has the same handwriting — the playful typography, the editorial content, the way it moves. It brings the in-store energy online, and that cohesion is what builds trust and loyalty.

Biscuiteers does the same thing from the first click. Unboxing, gifting options, every part of it considered. A biscuit boutique should feel like a treat.

Worth trying: consistency. Fonts, photography, tone of voice — it all adds up. Your brand should survive every interaction intact.

Operational excellence is customer experience

Behind every smooth journey is a backend doing the work: stock control, site speed, real-time delivery updates, returns that do not require a phone call.

Topps Tiles proves the point. Tiles are genuinely hard to buy online, so they invested in the things that make it possible — visualisers, sampling, and a B2B experience built for trade. It is not about selling more products. It is about removing friction for two very different shoppers.

Worth trying: treat UX as an operations problem as much as a design one. The gap between what looks good and what actually works gets closed by your dev team.

Personalisation is the baseline now

"People who bought this also bought" has had its day. With real-time data and AI in the mix, shoppers expect a site to know them and behave accordingly.

More of our clients are leaning into it, using Adobe Commerce (Magento) to drive personalised journeys, offers and content — curated product drops for returning customers, onboarding for new ones that does not read like it was written by a robot.

Worth trying: start small. Homepage banners that react to behaviour. Personalised email flows. Track what people engage with, then surface more of it.


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The journey does not end at "buy"

This is where a lot of brands run out of steam. The order is placed and the experience goes quiet. But post-purchase is full of room to work: branded tracking, something useful to read while they wait, an unboxing worth photographing.

LeMieux handles this well — considered packaging, thoughtful follow-ups, loyalty incentives. That is not good service, it is a reason to come back.

Worth trying: map the journey after checkout. Find the moments that could surprise someone. Automate what you can, personalise what matters.

Where that leaves you

Customer experience is not a nice-to-have. It is the reason people buy, come back, and tell someone else. There is no single formula, but the brands winning right now do three things consistently: they put the customer first in every decision, they invest in a platform like Adobe Commerce that scales with them, and they work with people who can actually build it.

Thinking about levelling up your eCommerce CX — replatforming, optimisation, or a rethink of the UX? We are always up for a chat. Call us on 0207 351 3521, or fill in our contact form and someone from our team will get in touch.

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