Trust is currency in e-commerce. A study by Edelman found that 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before making a purchase. It is a strong buying consideration across all demographics, regardless of geography, age group, gender, and income level. Unlike in physical retail, where trust is often established through firsthand product experience, e-commerce brands must build trust before a customer can touch your product. It starts the moment a customer interacts with your brand. Every claim you make sets expectations, and delivering on those expectations is what turns trust into conversions.
These expectations are reinforced through communication at every stage of the customer journey. Numerous studies have demonstrated that communication plays a critical role in enhancing customer satisfaction, improving retention, and building loyalty. However, it's important to note that these benefits are only realized when communication is real-time, consistent and accurate. After all, trust isn’t built on a single interaction. Customers need reassurance that they can rely on your brand to deliver on its promises every time.
The challenge lies in the complexity of e-commerce communication itself.
The Complexity of E-Commerce Communication
E-commerce brands handle incredible amounts of data daily, ranging from inventory levels and product SKUs to individual order details, expiration dates, as well as customer data for shipping and payment. Beyond managing this data, brands must convert it into high-value information that facilitates critical e-commerce activities. Moreover, it must be effectively communicated across the entire team and with end consumers, across every platform the brand or customer is active on.
This is where the complexity compounds. Brands must seamlessly integrate communication between internal and external customers across a multifaceted omnichannel environment.
Internal vs External Customer Communication
Internal customers include every employee, supplier, logistics team, fulfillment center, and support representative working behind the scenes to get your products from factory to porch. External customers are the buyers and end consumers interacting directly with your brand and driving revenue.
Many customer-facing issues are often symptoms of deeper operational misalignments caused by internal miscommunication. A McKinsey report highlighted that 70% of customer journeys are impacted by poor communication between teams. End consumers can only access accurate, timely information about product availability, shipping options, total costs, order status, and Expected Delivery Dates (EDDs), if your team has access to this data and is properly communicating it across and within the brand’s entire e-commerce enablement platform.
Omnichannel Communication
As native e-commerce brands grow and mature, selling across multiple channels (omnichannel) becomes a critical component of sustained growth. To successfully expand into these additional sales channels, clear communication and accurate data flow are cornerstones to successful launches.
With retailers PO issuance and acceptance, routing guide requirements, picking strategies (FEFO vs LEFO), delivery windows and load planning are new pieces of information that must flow seamlessly between multiple parties. Additionally, decisions must be made about how inventory is “shared” between channels to ensure commitments can be met and stock-outs do not occur.
Without tight internal communication and tech integration, the omnichannel promise breaks down. Systems are often disconnected in a traditional environment making it difficult to synchronize real-time data across teams. Providers like Stord, which focus on streamlining e-commerce enablement through an integrated logistics network of physical and digital fulfillment, can help eliminate many of these challenges.
Embracing this approach means you must provide a fully integrated and unified consumer experience across these disparate channels. Now, you not only have to ensure your teams communicate internally and with customers, but also transfer this level of communication to your brand website, app, social media, email, warehouse, and chat bot consistently.
For instance, when a customer asks a question about an order delay via Instagram DM, the social media team needs to pull the same real-time shipping data that the customer support team uses over email or live chat. Likewise, if inventory levels drop and the warehouse updates their system, that change must instantly reflect across all channels—from the product page on your site to a push notification about restock alerts. Even marketing campaigns must sync with logistics. Imagine offering a limited-time deal via email, only for a shopper to discover the item is out of stock because fulfillment teams weren’t able to inform your marketing initiatives.
Communication at Each Stage of the Buyer Journey
It is also important to consider how communication plays a role at every stage of the buyer journey.
1. Discovery and Engagement
Marketing and sales are responsible for driving initial customer interaction with the brand. This requires them to work closely with fulfillment teams to ensure that inventory records are accurate and promotional content matches SKU availability on all platforms. Moreover, for e-commerce brands with multi-node setups—where warehouses and fulfillment centers operate in different regions across the country—this alignment becomes even more critical. It’s not just about promoting the right product; it’s promoting the right product to the right audience, in the right place, at the right time.
Each fulfillment node should reflect the purchasing behaviors, climate, and lifestyle of the surrounding customer base. For instance, advertising sweaters to those in warmer regions not only misses the mark but also alienates customers. Likewise, promoting a trending item without verifying its availability in nearby fulfillment centers can result in longer delivery times, increased shipping costs, or even canceled orders that create unnecessary strain on operations.
Delays, confusion, and added workload can all be avoided with better communication between teams.
2. Purchase
Statistics reveal that 69.57% of shopping carts are abandoned, with a lack of clarity around total costs and complicated checkout processes being among the leading reasons. Brands invest time and money getting customers to their websites and encouraging them to add products to their cart, only to lose those customers with a lack of transparency.
An e-commerce site’s conversion rate increases by 35% if buyers see exactly what they need to make an informed decision. This includes clear communication about costs like item price, taxes, shipping and delivery fees, and return fees. Additionally, if a brand does not have estimated delivery dates (EDD) a customer can make a purchase under false expectations - they order on Friday and expect delivery in 2 days, but the fulfillment center is closed on weekends, so the order arrives on Tuesday, not on Sunday as they expected. This creates confusion, damages customer trust, and leads to customer service tickets, all of which could be avoided with proper technology-enabled communication.
3. Fulfillment and Shipping
Over 90% of e-commerce consumers say shipping accounts for at least half of their overall experience with the brand. Yet, 71% have had to reach out to customer service in the past year due to shipping or delivery issues. Each of those calls can cost you $5-8, and more often than not, the reps handling them don’t even have the data to provide clear answers. Providing customer-facing data, including in warehouse fulfillment updates, in transit shipping updates, and changes to EDD - all in real time - reduces support costs and builds trust. Brands that prioritize proactive communication, see up to a 25% reduction in support costs as fewer customers feel the need to reach out. If you receive 300 support calls a day, you save approximately $137k annually just by providing accurate communication along the fulfillment journey.
Expedited communication between teams is also critical in situations that arise during fulfillment. For instance, a customer orders a medium-sized red sweater, but shortly after placing the order, they realize they’d prefer a large in blue. They contact customer service to request the change before the order ships, but if communication between customer service, warehouse, and fulfillment teams isn’t properly coordinated, the request may not be passed along in time. As a result, the wrong size and color are packed and shipped, leading to a frustrating customer experience and a costly return process.
4. Post-Purchase
At this stage, customer support teams must be able to quickly locate information about each customer's order. If a customer receives a delivered notification but hasn't actually received their package, they'll reach out to report the issue. To provide accurate answers, your team needs to know exactly what happened to their parcel. Was it delivered to the wrong address? Was it accidentally marked as delivered? Was the package delivered when the customer was away, left unattended, and potentially stolen? Support teams can only answer these questions if they have accurate order status updates from your carrier provider. Any miscommunication or lack of information at this point can create frustration and destroy the trust that has been built earlier in the customer journey.
When brands fall short, customers don’t just survive the pain—they take their business elsewhere. In fact, almost 3 out of 4 customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience left unresolved. Most customers won’t even bother to complain; they’ll simply stop buying and will instead share their negative experience through reviews or social media—outlets that have a heavy influence on consumer buying decisions.
If your brand has 10,000 regular customers a month and 1% of them—100 people—have a bad experience due to miscommunication, and 75% of that group choose to switch to a competitor, that’s 75 lost customers. Now, if each of those 75 people share their negative experience and influence 2 potential buyers in their network, you’re looking at 150 additional potential sales lost from lapses in customer experience.
Consistent, integrated, and real-time communication, both internally and with customers, helps mitigate potential crises before they escalate.
Customer Communication as a Competitive Advantage
Effective customer communication is a strategic imperative in any e-commerce ecosystem. Trust is the foundation of customer relationships, and consistent, transparent communication is critical to building and maintaining that trust.
Buyers have countless options at their disposal and are quick to abandon brands that fall short of expectations. Brands that prioritize clear, consistent communication internally and with customers, across all channels, at every stage of the buyer journey, create experiences that customers can depend on. Trust built with communication becomes the ultimate differentiator in a saturated market.
E-commerce communication is complex, but with the right tech integration, brands can streamline the exchange of data and information at every touchpoint in e-commerce enablement that create value.
