Stop Building Funnels: Your Customer’s Shopping Behaviour Changed Years Ago

If we’re being honest, the linear customer journey or ‘funnel’ has always been somewhat of an over-simplification and now the environment that it tried to describe no longer exists. As we highlight in our Shopify Growth Playbook, new platforms, technologies and developments in user behaviour sees the journey become more of a web where users can enter and exit at any point, loop back or skip stages entirely.

Marketeers have struggled to keep pace with these developments and as a result can be left feeling uncomfortable with this new reality. But, what does it actually mean for marketeers and brands?

1. The journey was never linear
2. Here's what actually changed
3. No-one wants to admit it but there is a measurement problem
4. The joker in the pack...AI
5. What this means for you
6. About Herd

1. The journey was never linear but it gave us marketeers a shared language

Whilst there is no doubt the ‘traditional’ marketing funnel approach of Awareness – Consideration – Purchase – Advocacy over-simplified user behaviour, we still convinced ourselves that customers always followed a nice, straight, neat journey, giving marketeers a false sense of control. It helped us articulate complicated user behaviour to audiences that needed a simple framework to follow, typically senior individuals in an organisation.

The concept of the funnel was built for a world of captivated audiences spread across limited channels. In some ways the audience was guided by the constraints of how they could discover, research and buy from a brand. With marketing teams following this somewhat rigid structure teams could become siloed with awareness, conversion and retention being managed in isolation from each other.

Each team built metrics and KPIs into their activity which re-enforced this notion of a customer being ‘in’ a funnel when actually that was never the reality. That world has developed faster than marketing approaches have, and now we’re faced with a new complex, uncomfortable reality.

2. Here's what actually changed...

It’s important to note it’s not a case of user behaviour necessarily going through a fundamental change but instead the development of the online environment around them.

A significant factor is that users simply have considerably more touchpoints where they can discover products and brands, research and evaluate their options as well as how the purchase is facilitated. It’s now entirely possible and probable that a new user can convert without ever interacting with a brands owned property and therefore the direct influence a brand desires to have is less.

Estimates on the amount of touchpoints a user now typically encounter on their path to purchase vary. Some suggest over 20 but what we can agree on is that it’s hard to imagine how that can be a linear path and instead, indicates the reality of extended and repeated steps in the eventual path to becoming a customer. A significant development has been within digital platforms and what is termed the ‘zero click’ search.

Historically, a user would have potentially had to move through platforms, whether that be third party or a brands own properties, to get closer to achieving their goal. This has changed. Users increasingly never have to leave a platform, from initially encountering a product to conversion, whether that be TikTok Shop, Instagram checkout or more recently AI and LLMs, where checkouts are integrated directly into results. From this, the journey collapses or is significantly compressed to fewer touchpoints.

With an increased level of touchpoints comes the exposure of opportunity for not just incremental but existing customers to be lured by competitor brands. Szu-Yu Chou summarised this previously in the Journal of Business Research:

“Consumers can switch and combine channels interchangeably, seamlessly, and uncontrollably from different sources and competitors in their decision process, leading to cross-channel free-riding, which in turn can erode consumer loyalty and profits”.

Further to this, recent studies highlight how Gen Z seem reluctant to be tied down to a brand. 62% suggest they would check out other options, even if they have a favourite brand. Developments in advertising tactics and methods across platforms has made it increasingly easy for competing brands to intercept users in their engagement with a brand.

Not necessarily a direct result of the developing online ecosystem but digital media is become ever increasingly expensive. Therefore judging a channel’s performance based on a single moment is diminishing. Advertisers need to have a broader view of overarching profitability of customers.

The journey on which a customer might go through can now be treated more like an infinite loop, with each stage including more ways than ever for a user to convert. What’s important to consider is how each stage influences another and that a user can actually shortcut, skip, re-enter or leave the process altogether.

3. No-one wants to admit it but there is a measurement problem

For years there has been an unspoken, collective agreement to pretend that attribution works perfectly, but this isn’t exactly the truth anymore.

Even in 2026, last-click attribution is still the default for many brands. It provides a simplistic view of the last touchpoint a user interacted with before completing a transaction. But it tells you nothing of the reviews they read, the video they watched of the influencer showcasing your product, the opinions they sought on Reddit or the cards they pinned on Pinterest.

Multi-touch attribution was meant to help fix this, re-distributing credit across touchpoints, but we need accept that not everything was visible in the first place. A significant portion of the journey may have already been dark and is increasingly so in modern journeys.

The data that we’ve become accustom to is not necessarily wrong, but more so in-complete, moulded to a framework that has become ingrained in thinking. It provides clear outcomes to the inputs (usually media spend and resulting conversions) and therefore allows us to reside in a comfort zone, the risk being the influence this has on marketing decisions and providing a false confidence.

4. The joker in the pack...AI

Artificial intelligence, developed search engines and LLMs are arguably the single largest development. AI has the ability to recommend, compare, evaluate and facilitate a purchase for a user, collapsing the funnel into potentially just a single moment. The example shows how an initial discovery trigger results in consideration, evaluation and purchase facilitation all being presented in a single result.

5. What this means for you

I think the most significant change is not one of re-distributing budget or pivoting channels but instead a shift in mindset for brands and marketing teams. It’s moving to thinking more in terms of presence, trust and authenticity, not just conversion paths. With this, brands will need to start leaning into and investing in what could be considered ‘dark moments’. Moments which you might not be able to track (communities for example) with a short-term KPI.

This is a shift from historical input = measurable output expectation of marketing activity, respecting those moments that were once forgotten or taken for granted will no doubt feel uncomfortable and potentially require a new culture to be built within internal teams, allowing for budget to be distributed in new ways.

A greater focus on brand, your proposition and how customers perceive you takes greater prominence given the influencing factors of whether you and how your brand is surfaced within AI search and platforms. Further to this, studies show that customer reviews influence new customers.

65% of users suggesting they trust customer reviews over influencers, highlighting further the importance of this aspect. With this in mind, and considering the volume of touchpoints available, your brand being consistent across everything they do is more important than ever. It will drive discoverability, whether that be by humans or machines and importantly, trusted as a user moves through their journey. Brand loyalty is something that has to be earnt.

Competitors are ever closer throughout the journey, so this focus on brand and building authenticity is the key to long term success. In the age of messy journeys and increasing media cost, brands who adapt tracking and data modelling will benefit as they develop their focus towards customer life time value and profit as opposed to single moment within the journey.

This sees brands optimising away from simple moments in the funnel and instead building into an ecosystem through owned, earned, and paid media all working together without an assumed sequence.

We’ve highlighted the difficulties in attribution so what can brands do? Appreciate that not one solution is likely to oversee 100% of the user journey. A combination of platform analytics, brand tracking surveys and incremental testing is likely to provide a greater picture.

Incrementality tests are a reliable way to understand whether activity is actually driving outcomes that would not have occurred should the activity of not ran. Brands can withhold activity from a comparative control group and measure the difference between both. These tests can be complex so having a clear test plan is key to this.

Media mix modelling (MMM) has been increasingly discussed in recent years, coinciding with the deprecation of third-party cookies which has forced teams to look for alternatives in measurement. Unlike traditional attribution, MMM works at a macro level, modelling the relationship between spend and outcomes across channels over time. It has the benefit of capturing those non-linear effects of wider marketing activities.

Whilst we can’t shy away from the fact that the ecosystem has developed to make user journeys more complicated, messy, and somewhat unpredictable, brands don’t need to be intimidated by this. Key principles, which should have always been a pillar of marketing efforts are now more important than ever.

Brands that can adjust their mindset towards these complexities, focus on authenticity and deliver their communications with consistency whilst focusing marketing activities around this wider ecosystem will ultimately set themselves up for longer-term success.

In our Shopify Growth Playbook, Herd's team of experts, along with contributions from our partners, dive deep into what the customer journey actually looks like in 2026. Considering each aspect of the eCommerce customer journey now and in the future, our Playbook helps marketeers achieve their business goals. Download your copy here.

6. About Herd

Herd are based in Hessle, and we specialise in performance marketing and Shopify development. We combine our expertise across both areas to deliver solutions that are ambitious and impactful.

Over the past decade, we’ve earned Shopify Premier Partner status and driven growth for a host of ambitious global brands, executing bespoke strategies that are grounded in data.

Our talented performance marketing team features vastly experienced channel experts across SEO, paid media, content, and digital PR.