The whole idea of a "customer journey on Amazon" is mostly a fantasy. The platform is not a neat funnel you guide people through. It’s a chaotic, algorithm-driven marketplace where you don’t control the path. Your focus shouldn't be on mapping a journey, but on winning the specific, critical moments where a customer interacts with your brand.
It's tempting to apply the classic marketing funnel here. Many people talk about breaking the process into Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages. They'll advise you to map out customer touchpoints, create content for each phase, and build a cohesive Brand Storytelling narrative using your Amazon Storefront. The goal is to create a smooth, predictable path from discovery to purchase, borrowing a playbook that works well for direct-to-consumer websites. On the surface, it seems like a sophisticated way to approach Brand Building on Amazon.
But this model quickly falls apart in practice. As Matthew Rosenfeld explained on the Amazon Legends Podcast, tracking customer behavior on a vast marketplace is incredibly challenging. Shoppers don't move in a straight line. They might see your sponsored ad, click a competitor's product, search a different keyword, see your organic listing, and then get distracted, only to return hours later through a completely different ad. You can't truly see or control that path. Destaney Wishon, on an episode of The Seller's Edge, even questions the default wisdom of sending external traffic to a brand store instead of straight to a product page, which just shows how little is truly settled. The customer is on Amazon's journey, not yours.
Instead of mapping a phantom journey, you should obsess over the parts you actually influence. First is the search results page. As Sim Mahon detailed on Seller Sessions, your main image, title, and price are your entire sales pitch at that moment. This is where the battle for the click is won or lost. Second is the product detail page itself. This is your one shot at Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Use every tool available, from A+ content to video. Alina Vlaic made a great point on Amazon Legends about maximizing the Q&A section with videos to proactively address customer concerns and build trust right on the page.
Finally, the single most important part of the journey you can build is what happens after the first sale. This is where you can create real loyalty. On an episode of The Smartest Amazon Seller, the host Scott detailed how you can "grow your business by 41% through a post purchase experience". This is your opportunity to build a direct relationship, solicit feedback, and encourage repeat purchases. By focusing your energy on these high-leverage moments—the search, the product page, and the follow-up—you're investing in what actually grows your sales on Amazon.