Classification of consumers in context of online customer journey and experience

With the increase in the number of touch points, customers can design their own purchasing journeys. This journey covers all the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase processes. Meeting the wishes and needs of customers throughout the journey and providing a good experience are important for companies in today's competitive environment. For this reason, it is necessary to analyze the contact points and the journey process used by the customers during their journey. In this context, the purpose of this study is to divide customers into sections according to the contact points that customers use on their journey to purchase and to explore the relationship of these sections with journey satisfaction and website experience. For this purpose, a questionnaire consisting of four parts was used as a data collection tool. Questionnaires were administered to 210 participants. Factors that will help to differentiate the participants in the survey according to their customers' purchasing journeys have been determined. As a result of the clustering analysis using the 12 factors that emerged later, the participants were classified under 4 different groups as "forced shoppers, utilitarians, experiential shoppers and full shoppers". It was observed that there were significant differences between these groups in terms of social experience, website functionality, website shopping experience, journey satisfaction, touchpoint usage and touchpoint satisfaction.