Updated October 2025

Behavioral analytics for e-commerce analyzes user behavior on your site, revealing why shoppers drop off the customer journey or conversion path and showing you how to fix user frustration points to boost sales.

By 2025, e-commerce accounts for around 22–23% of all global retail sales and continues to rise. Forecasts from Statista and eMarketer expect it to exceed 25% by 2027, showing steady year-over-year growth despite market saturation.

What is user behavior analytics in eCommerce

Understanding online behaviour is complex but essential. In the customer-centric and AI-driven era, behavioral analytics gives you the “why” behind every click and hesitation. Without it, you’re competing blindly in one of the most data-saturated markets. It’s no wonder that one of the driving forces of most eCommerce is behavioral analytics.

Behavior analytics in retail allows gathering, processing, and analyzing data to help eCommerce stores to understand their online customers: what they want, what they’re looking for, how long it takes for them to finalize the purchase, and what they think is missing in your eCommerce store.

Recent research highlights a major shift:

• 52% of all shopping journeys now start online (VML, 2025)
• Consumers are more value-driven and less loyal than before (42Signals, 2025)
• Mobile dominates discovery, but conversion depends on user experience quality
• These changes make behavioural analytics a must-have, not a luxury.

Use behavioral analytics to:

• adjust your offer to customer segments,
• run effective paid campaigns tailored to customer expectations,
• personalize your digital products,
• empower your sales activities
• increase customer loyalty and retention,
• map real customer journey,
• find bottlenecks in your products that can hold your customers from converting.

Why behavioral analytics is crucial for eCommerce success

For some time, behavior analytics has been a standard fare for big players such as Amazon, Zalando, or T-Mobile.

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that the big brands can always send you a perfect list of items that you probably would like to buy, even though you have never seen them? It’s not magic, it’s a perfect example of the use of behavior analytics.

But right now, not only huge enterprises use behavioral analytics in their daily routine. Small and medium eCommerce stores also take advantage of using behavioral analytics.

Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how significant your company is. To achieve desirable turnover you need to understand your customer behavior – what they want, what are their needs, and when is the perfect moment for them to purchase.

From a marketer's point of view

Running effective paid campaigns, and optimizing your marketing activities can be quite a challenge. Every marketing specialist who deals with paid campaigns knows that.

Let’s discuss an example: you have high traffic on your campaign links, but only few customers purchase. In that case, you can take advantage of CUX’s grouped heatmaps.

It allows you to analyze the behavior of only those customers who came to your site from a specific source, in this case from paid campaigns.

By analyzing grouped heatmaps you will be able to find what interests the most customers or what’s not working.

From a sales point of view

Cooperation between the marketing and sales department has never been so tight. Times when the sales team contacts potential customers via phone are over. Especially in eCommerce.

Right now it is the marketing that is responsible for generating new leads, nurturing them with personalized content such as newsletter, special offers or paid campaigns and turning them into loyal customers.

By following users’ online habits and analyzing behaviors the sales team can find a perfect occasion for upselling or cross-selling tailored to customer needs.

From a customer service point of view

Behavioral analytics in eCommerce can be a true mine of knowledge to provide the best customer service.

Behavioral data can help you find frustration triggers which may cause drops in conversion and lead to customer churn.

Latest statistics proved that 32% of customers would abandon even their beloved brand after a single bad experience on the page.

There is no time to waste. Analyze what makes your customers angry, what frustrates them, what part of the customer journey is the most problematic one and implement improvements.

How do behavioral analytics tools collect eCommerce insights?

After all those pats on the back, you probably can’t wait to apply behavioral analytics to your eCommerce. But how to do that?

You can find on the market dedicated tools for behavioral analytics, they might also appear under the name of user behavioral analytics (UBA) tools or dedicated customer service analytics software.

Today’s behavioural analytics tools combine AI-powered interpretation with real-time tracking, turning click-level data into insight. They reveal what stands behind user actions, detect anomalies, and even predict next-best actions or potential churn before it happens. Don’t be ashamed of yourself, there is nothing wrong with it. Most of those tools work according to GDPR and value customers’ privacy.

Modern behavioral tools go beyond on-page analytics. They integrate predictive models that estimate conversion likelihood, identify churn risk, and connect behavior across channels (mobile, desktop, in-app, email). This gives a unified view of the entire customer journey, not just isolated sessions.

Key features of every behavioral analytics tool

Each tool offers slightly different features, subscription plans or amounts of data that can be collected. But there are a few features that remain an integral part of almost every behavioral analytics tool.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are graphic visualizations of all users’ engagement, not necessarily only pleasant. They visualize the user’s activity through spots of different colors and sizes.

There 3 types of them:

• heatmaps – show what users clicked;
• linkmaps – present what links customers clicked but nothing more;
• scrollmaps – show how deep customers went in the page

It’s worth checking if analytics tools provide both – heatmaps and linkmaps. With linkmaps, which only refer to places that contain links, you won’t be able to find non-clickable elements that your customer may click.

Users’ visit recordings

Almost every behavioral analytics tool allows you to see every customer interaction. Every click, scroll, mouse or chaotic movement.

It’s not like you were watching them from across the street or behind a curtain. With session recordings it is more like sitting behind them and looking over their shoulders to see exactly what is happening on their screen.

Unfortunately, session recordings will not give you a full picture of your customer behavior. To see that you need to analyze recordings of visits rather than sessions.

Web analytics

Through web analytics you can get a different sneak peek of your customers and their behavioral patterns – what kind of browsers they use, what kind of devices or operational system they are keen on.

Web analytics also indicates which platform, operating systems or browsers bring the most conversions.

Some behavioral analytics tools have an option of checking what kind of devices customers are using.

Mobile commerce continues to dominate. According to Statista (2025), around 80% of all online shoppers have made at least one purchase via smartphone in the past six months, and m-commerce now accounts for nearly 70% of total e-commerce traffic. Behavioural analytics helps pinpoint why conversion gaps still appear between devices.

Choosing the right behavioral analytics tool for eCommerce

Understanding customers' needs plays a pivotal role in successful eCommerce. To win customers’ hearts and increase customer lifetime value eCommerce need to conduct the best service, product, or offer that meets their customer's expectations.

It's the only way to do it and a behavioral analytics tool will help. No matter if you offer a product or service, have a website or app, or if you are eCommerce.

Behavioral analytics solution – cux.io

There are dozens of behavioral analytics tools on the market. But in this article we focus only on the one – CUX. We know that the competition doesn’t have to be worse and is just slightly different, but we don't want to bore you.

CUX is the first behavioral analytics platform combining AI-driven insights with expert interpretation. It detects user frustration, pinpoints the exact moment conversion drops occur, and, through the CUX Insight Assistant, explains why these behaviors happen and what to fix next.

Let’s be honest, if your customers come across too many obstacles (and sometimes even one is too much), they will not bother moving forward in their customer journey. More likely they will abandon it. That’s why CUX is focusing on user journey analytics.

CUX's help, you can quickly spot the exact moments when your users become frustrated, and eliminate them.

Don’t believe me? Talk to our experts. There’s no use waiting.