Journey — the 8-stage diagnostic
In plain English
Every customer goes through the same journey with you. They hear about you, they look around, they join your list, they buy, they enjoy it, they buy again, they recommend you, they actively promote you.
That's eight steps, and money leaks out at every one of them.
This screen grades all eight, out of 100, against what stores like yours typically achieve. Then it points at the lowest one and says "that's your problem."
Why the lowest one matters so much: the stages are a chain. If almost nobody comes back for a second purchase, then getting twice as much traffic gets you twice as many one-time buyers and not much else. Fixing the weak link is the only thing that moves the whole chain.
How to use it
- Click "Growth Science" in the left-hand menu, then the "Journey" tab.
- Look at the eight scores. They're grouped as Before (getting attention), During (the sale), and After (what happens next).
- Find the lowest score. The app also highlights it for you.
- Read what that stage means and what its score is based on.
- Click the button on that stage. It takes you to the exact feature that fixes it.
- Work on that one stage only. Ignore the rest for now.
- Come back in a month and check whether the score moved.
⏱ ~5 min to read · 💳 Pro+ · 🎯 Find the one thing holding your growth back
Why this matters for your business
Ask most shop owners what's holding their growth back and you'll get a confident answer. Ask them how they know, and the answer gets vague. It's usually the thing they were already worried about, or the thing a consultant mentioned, or whatever went wrong most recently.
The trouble is that the real bottleneck is very often somewhere nobody's looking — because the parts of the business people watch closely are the parts that tend to be working. Traffic gets watched. Conversion rate gets watched. What happens 60 days after someone's first order usually doesn't.
This diagnostic doesn't have a favourite. It grades all eight stages on the same scale, from the same data, and reports what it finds. A store that's convinced it has a traffic problem and actually has a retention problem will find that out in about five minutes.
The benchmark comparison is what makes the scores usable. A 2% conversion rate sounds bad until you know that's roughly typical. A 14% repeat rate sounds fine until you know the benchmark is 27%. Without a reference point, every number is just a number.
What this typically unlocks
| What you get | Typical result |
|---|---|
| Finding your actual bottleneck | ~5 minutes |
| Effort spent on the wrong problem | Largely eliminated |
| Knowing which feature to use | One click from the weak stage |
| A shared view across your team | Yes — eight numbers everyone can see |
| Measuring whether a fix worked | Re-run monthly, watch the stage move |
What you actually get
Eight stages, in three groups.
Before the sale
| Stage | What it measures | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Aware | Are enough people finding you? Page views per day | 60/day |
| Engage | Do visitors show interest? Add-to-cart rate out of product views | 8% |
| Subscribe | Do they join your list? Opted-in share of known customers | 25% |
During the sale
| Stage | What it measures | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Convert | Do they buy? Purchases out of product views | 2% |
After the sale
| Stage | What it measures | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Excite | Are they happy? Reviews + survey responses per purchase | 20% |
| Ascend | Do they buy again? Repeat buyers out of all buyers | 27% |
| Advocate | Do they refer anyone? Customers with at least one referral | 5% |
| Promote | Do referrals drive real money? Referral revenue share | 5% |
Where each stage sends you
| Weak stage | Fix it with | Or try |
|---|---|---|
| Aware | Orchestration — drive traffic | SEO engine |
| Engage | CRO audit | Awareness copy |
| Subscribe | Opt-in setup | — |
| Convert | Offer Lab | Cart recovery |
| Excite | Reviews & NPS collection | — |
| Ascend | Loyalty | Subscriptions |
| Advocate | Reviews collection | Referrals |
| Promote | Referral program | — |
Two honest limitations
The Aware stage under-counts, always. It measures people who visited your shop. But the whole point of awareness is reaching people who haven't visited yet — and by definition, those people leave no trace in your shop's data. Treat this score as a floor, not a full picture. If it's your lowest stage, use the Reach tool for a better view.
Scores are relative, not absolute. A score of 45 doesn't mean you're 45% good. It means you're well below what stores like yours typically achieve on that measure. A score of 90 doesn't mean you're finished, either — it means you're comfortably ahead of benchmark and your effort is better spent elsewhere.
If a stage has no data yet — a new shop with no referrals, say — it shows as "no data yet" rather than scoring zero and looking like a crisis.
How it works (without the technical bits)
Real merchant scenarios
Scenario A — The traffic problem that wasn't
Setup. Homeware brand, £1.4m/year, flat for three quarters. About to double their ad budget.
Journey scores:
| Stage | Score |
|---|---|
| Aware | 71 |
| Engage | 68 |
| Subscribe | 44 |
| Convert | 62 |
| Excite | 51 |
| Ascend | 19 |
| Advocate | 24 |
| Promote | 11 |
The read. The front half was healthy. The back half had collapsed — almost nobody bought twice.
Why doubling ads would have failed. More traffic through a funnel that loses everyone after one order produces more one-time buyers, at a higher cost each, with no compounding.
Action. Followed the Ascend link into Second Purchase, which found 840 one-time buyers sitting in their reorder window.
Result after four months: repeat rate 14% → 26%, revenue +31%, ad budget unchanged.
Scenario B — A high score that meant "stop working on this"
Setup. Merchant had spent five months on conversion-rate optimisation. Convert score: 88.
What that meant. Their conversion rate was well ahead of benchmark. Further CRO work would produce diminishing returns.
Their Subscribe score was 31. They were converting visitors brilliantly and capturing almost none of the ones who weren't ready to buy yet.
Action. Switched effort to opt-in capture. List grew 4× in a quarter, and the email channel — previously negligible — became 19% of revenue.
The lesson. A high score is permission to stop. That's as valuable as knowing where to start.
Scenario C — "No data yet" read correctly
Setup. New shop, six weeks old. Advocate and Promote both showed "no data yet."
Initial reaction. Panic — two stages at zero.
What it actually meant. They had no referral programme set up, so there was nothing to measure. Not a failure; an absence.
Action. Ignored both for now and worked on Convert (score 38), which was a real problem. Revisited referrals at month five, once there were enough happy customers to refer anyone.
Right call. A referral programme with 40 customers refers almost nobody. Sequence matters.
Scenario D — The bottleneck that moved
Setup. Apparel brand fixed their Ascend stage over a quarter — 22 up to 58.
Re-ran Journey. New lowest stage: Engage, at 41.
Why it appeared now. It had always been 41. It just hadn't been the constraint while Ascend was at 22. Fixing one link promotes the next-weakest to bottleneck.
This is the normal pattern. Each month, one stage. Over a year, the whole chain lifts. Trying to fix all eight at once means fixing none of them properly.
Best practices
✅ Work only on your lowest stage. Everything else is a distraction until that one moves.
✅ Re-run monthly. Your bottleneck moves as you fix things.
✅ Read benchmarks, not raw scores. 2% conversion is normal; 14% repeat rate is not.
✅ Treat a high score as permission to stop working on that area.
✅ Use the deep-link button rather than deciding for yourself which feature to use — it's the whole point of the diagnostic.
✅ Share the eight scores with your team. It ends most priority arguments in one screen.
❌ Don't panic at "no data yet." It means not measurable, not broken.
❌ Don't chase the Aware score first without checking Reach — Aware under-counts by design.
❌ Don't work on three stages at once. You won't move any of them enough to tell whether it worked.
❌ Don't expect a stage to jump in a week. Most take a month or two of consistent work.
Plan tiers
| Capability | Free | Starter | Pro | Agency | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All 8 stage scores | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Benchmark comparison | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Weakest-stage highlight | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Deep-links to fixes | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Score history over time | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-store journey comparison | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
Frequently asked
Where do the benchmarks come from? Established industry averages for direct-to-consumer commerce — for example, roughly 27% repeat purchase rate and around 2% overall conversion.
Why is my Aware score low when traffic feels fine? It compares views per day against a benchmark of 60/day. It also can't see anyone who hasn't visited yet, so it under-counts real awareness. Check Reach for the fuller picture.
Can I change the benchmarks for my category? Not currently. Fixed benchmarks keep scores comparable over time and between stores.
How far back does it look? Funnel stages (Aware, Engage, Convert) use a rolling recent window. Lifecycle stages (Ascend, Advocate, Promote) use your cumulative customer history.
Why did a score drop when I didn't change anything? Seasonality is the usual cause — traffic and conversion both move with the calendar. Look at the trend over three months rather than month to month.
Should every stage be above 80? No. Most healthy stores have two or three strong stages, a few middling, and one weak. The aim is to keep raising the floor, not to max everything.
What if two stages are equally low? Fix the earlier one in the funnel first — it feeds everything after it.
See also
- Growth Science overview — all eight tools
- Positioning — fill this in early
- Second Purchase — the usual fix for a weak Ascend
- Offer Lab — the usual fix for a weak Convert
- Reach — a better view of awareness
- Loyalty overview — building repeat purchase
- Referral program — Advocate and Promote
- Growth Intelligence — the numbers behind the stages