What is an ecommerce CRM? Your guide to customer relationship management

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One viral bad review can snowball into a major threat to your ecommerce business. 

But even before social media, customer satisfaction was key to longevity. Just ask Dell.

In 2005, Dell limped through a major PR debacle that started with a single unhappy customer: writer Jeff Jarvis. He blogged about his frustrations with his “lemon” laptop, an expensive in-home repair service that never materialized, and slow customer service that drove him online.

Dissatisfied customers flocked to his comments section. A mini-movement was born. Over the next year, Dell’s stock price dropped 42%.

Since then, the risk of a “Dell Hell”-style news cycle has only grown. For B2C brands, that risk is tenfold, since their audience of customers is an even larger pool of people.

How can modern businesses thrive in spite of that risk? By proactively managing customer interactions and relationships at scale with a CRM—a software designed to make customer success inevitable, even when customer service teams are slow to respond. 

Let’s dig into what an ecommerce CRM is, how retailers benefit from one, how to build a CRM strategy for your business, and the key questions to ask yourself as you shop for one.

What is an ecommerce CRM?

Think of a customer relationship management system (CRM) as a company’s living, annotated Rolodex.

It’s a searchable digital log where sales and customer service teams can manually enter updates from conversations with customers—or log them automatically if your company is using a B2C CRM like Klaviyo.

The goal of an ecommerce CRM is to help you deliver personalized experiences by consolidating data from multiple touchpoints. The ideal solution is built for your entire organization—from marketing to customer service.

It’s important to note that ecommerce CRMs are not the same thing as B2B CRMs. B2B CRMs are popular (think Salesforce or Hubspot), but they manage contacts at an account level. That isn’t how consumers shop with ecommerce brands.

Instead, retailers need a CRM based on individuals, with built-in marketing automation, customer service, and analytics features that personalize the customer experience for every single customer, at scale. 

That’s a mouthful, so let’s visualize it instead. Here’s a view of Klaviyo’s tech architecture—the only CRM built for B2C. 

What are the features of an ecommerce CRM?

A great B2C CRM is powerful. The right solution:

• Centralizes each customer’s contact information and browsing, purchasing, and customer service history in one accessible spot
• Lets users—from marketers to customer service reps—generate custom reports based on past purchase history, message engagement, tickets and resolutions, etc.  
• Helps leadership forecast revenue and predict customer behavior—while reducing silos across departments

In terms of features, there are 4 main pillars, with several features in each:

1. Data layer

A data platform is the core of any good ecommerce CRM. None of the other features or functionalities of a CRM will work if the tool doesn’t aggregate all customer data into a single profile, and let marketing and service teams access and act on that data to personalize the customer experience.

That’s the entire point of an ecommerce CRM—which is why the data platform layer is so important. 

2. Marketing automation 

Marketing automation is the action layer of any good ecommerce CRM. This is where you go to send messages across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile push. Those messages can be part of campaigns or automations, including welcome series, abandoned cart flows, post-purchase flows, and more. 

This is also typically where acquisition tools live, too, like integrations with social media advertising platforms and forms for list building. 

3. Customer service 

Customer service for ecommerce brands doesn’t always have to be hands-on. Most ecommerce customers want self-service options. They want access to FAQs and product guides. They want to know where they could chat with an agent if necessary, but they don’t need that to be their first option. 

What ecommerce customers need is a hub—a place they can log in and see all of their purchase history, and related support content based on those purchases. 

4. Reporting and analytics 

Finally, an ecommerce CRM needs to have robust reporting and analytics capabilities, including predictive analytics. This gives you visibility into how your campaigns and automations are performing. You also want insight into RFM models, and when a segment of customers might purchase next. 

What are some fields in an ecommerce CRM system?

On an account page, you’ll often find fields like:

• Customer name
• Email and phone contact information
• Personal communication preferences (i.e., if they have opted into your newsletter, SMS messages, or push notifications, and when they opted in) 
• Browsing history
• Purchase history
• Predicted purchases and product preferences 
• Message history across email, SMS, and push notifications, including engagement with those messages 
• Customer service history, including ticket information, phone calls, email touchpoints, and any resolutions

Why do traditional CRMs fall short for ecommerce companies?

CRM software has traditionally been associated with B2B companies managing lengthy sales cycles, but that’s not the reality for B2C companies. Today’s ecommerce brands have to manage relationships with millions of customers across multiple touchpoints. 

When you consider this, here’s where traditional CRMs fall short:

• Speed and scale mismatch: B2C companies have millions of customers making rapid purchasing decisions. Since most CRMs are built for B2B companies, they can’t handle that level of complexity and scale because they were meant for lower-volume account management.
• Channel fragmentation: B2C customers interact with brands across multiple channels—email, SMS, social media, website, and in-store. But traditional CRMs weren’t designed to unify these touchpoints. Instead, they rely on manual entry and intensive data hygiene practices, leaving your team to do most of the hard work.
• Data silos: Your typical CRM is sales-focused, so your marketing, customer service, and commerce teams don’t have the insights they need to make smarter decisions. This fragmentation makes it impossible to deliver the unified experiences B2C customers expect.
• Limited personalization: While B2B relationships focus on account management, B2C success depends on scaled personalization—something traditional CRMs weren’t built to handle.
• Ecommerce integration gaps: Traditional CRMs lack native integrations with essential ecommerce tools like ecommerce platforms, loyalty programs, review platforms, subscription management systems, and website analytics. Without these integrations, it’s hard to know the status of every customer’s experience or interaction with your brand.

5 benefits of using an ecommerce CRM

The benefits of using an ecommerce CRM and consolidating your tech stack are endless—seriously. But let’s look at a quick case study and ground ourselves in data. 

Alexandra Barlowe, DTC email and SMS marketing director at Tata Harper Skincare, faced a problem familiar to many ecommerce brands: her customer data was scattered across multiple platforms, and each platform spoke its own language. “It was just a clunkier experience,” Barlowe says. 

To address this fragmentation, Tata Harper consolidated their email and SMS marketing in Klaviyo—growing their total revenue from flows by 139% YoY in Q1 2024. 

That’s the power of tech consolidation, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg in what an ecommerce CRM can deliver. Here are a few more benefits you can expect to see: 

1. Unify your customer data from different tools

Your ecommerce CRM automatically consolidates all your customer data into one reliable database. Whether a customer is browsing on your ecommerce site or reaching out for help with a product, all of that data is collected and stored in their customer profile.

This means that any team member can view any customer’s complete history—and personalize their interactions so that customer feels seen and understood, no matter who they’re talking to. 

Ecommerce CRMs also eliminate reporting problems by maintaining consistent attribution and tracking across all channels. When a customer makes a purchase, you’ll know exactly which touchpoints influenced their decision—so you can re-invest in the channels that matter.

This a stark contrast to point solutions, which offer siloed views at attribution, often over-indexing on their own tool’s impact on the bottom line. 

2. Unlock true 1:1 personalization at scale

The “at scale” part here is really important for ecommerce brands. B2B CRMs help companies personalize sales conversations to a business account and understand the organization structure they are selling into. Because of the nature of B2B, there are far fewer accounts than what a typical B2C business might see. 

B2C companies like ecommerce brands sell to consumers. As a result, they often need to keep records for thousands or millions of customers—and they need to personalize the customer experience for every single one of those customers based on their browsing patterns, purchase history, service history, and more.

That’d be a lot for a large team to manage, much less the typically small ecommerce marketing team. This is why personalization at scale is so important. 

An ecommerce CRM needs to make it easy for ecommerce marketers to build dynamic messages and automations that send the right personalized message, at the right time, to the right consumers—all without the marketer needing to touch every single message, every single time. 

AI is incredibly helpful here, too. It analyzes patterns in browning behavior or engagement data to predict what your customers need, prompting you to create new segments, send new campaigns, or optimize messages.

The result? You’re always one step ahead, and your customers get what they want, when they want it.

3. Respond faster to consumer needs

Let’s say there’s a sudden surge in cart abandonments for a specific product line. Ideally, your ecommerce CRM alerts you immediately so you can take real-time action to address the problem, without learning about it weeks after it occurred (and weeks after it’s been impacting your bottom line). 

Or, let’s look at a simpler, and more common situation: your customer needs help with a product they’ve just received. With an ecommerce CRM, your customer can log in to a customer hub to see their purchase history and all FAQs related to the product, and easily chat with your team if needed. This addresses your customer’s need for fast, self-service answers while making it clear your team is there to help. 

Finally, since you have everything in one place—like customer segments, email templates, and campaign performance data—you can also set up A/B tests, monitor outcomes in real time, and roll out personalized campaigns much faster.

4. Improve the customer experience

Your customers might not know your CRM exists, but they can feel it. When you choose the right ecommerce CRM for your store, customers get:

Overall, the ecommerce CRM helps create a feeling of forward momentum for customers.

5. Save valuable employee bandwidth

An ecommerce CRM consolidates all customer data in one spot and lets your team easily use that data to personalize the customer experience. This means you can export less data between point solutions, reduce customer service tickets, and eliminate any reliance on developers creating SQL queries to pull data from one system to another just to send a single message. 

How are ecommerce companies using CRMs?

Now that you know how an ecommerce CRM benefits your business, let’s explore a few ecommerce CRM use cases from real-life brands:

1. Scale personalization with precise segmentation

The “Hey, [first name]” days of personalization are over. Smart and forward-thinking ecommerce brands take it to the next level by creating experiences that feel magical. 

Seafood brand Svenfish faced a common challenge with their “catch of the day” promotions: the small batches sold out quickly, and they needed to tightly target their promotional emails to avoid disappointing customers. 

To address this, Svenfish uses Klaviyo to segment customers based on past browsing behavior and purchase patterns, ensuring promotions reached those most likely to be interested. This helps explain how Klaviyo drives 70% of their ecommerce revenue.

“We’re making Klaviyo our central CRM. It’s easy to use, it’s modern, and it makes our lives simpler with AI,” says Sreevats R., product manager at Svenfish. “You don’t want to waste time, especially at a small business like Svenfish, where we’re all wearing multiple hats. Klaviyo makes life easier.”

2. Streamline operations with a central, user-friendly CRM 

Daily Harvest, a meal subscription service, realized that scattered customer data prevented them from quickly responding to customer needs. By moving to Klaviyo, they reduced software costs by 18% and their development team no longer had to intervene every time they made a change.

“We see Klaviyo as our customer CRM hub. Everything that we work with going forward should have a connection to Klaviyo and Shopify. It just makes processes go faster,” says YuJin Yong, VP of digital at Daily Harvest.

3. Optimize performance through automation and testing

Smart brands are constantly testing and fine-tuning their approach, from subject lines to template designs.

Tinned seafood brand Fishwife, for example, frequently ran A/B tests on email campaign layouts—such as different lengths, images, and button placements. These constant optimizations contributed to a 67x Klaviyo ROI for the business.

“A specific format in an email can drive thousands more dollars,” says Patrick Butcher, Fishwife’s marketing consultant. 

How to choose a CRM: 6 key questions to ask yourself

There are more than 1,500 B2B CRM providers out there—from freemium options to enterprise solutions—and they each have their own complicated constellation of features. But Klaviyo is the only CRM built for B2C.

While that’s a big deal, we don’t expect you to choose us simply due to a lack of other options. Instead, ask yourself these 6 questions to make sure you choose the right CRM for your business.

1. How easy is it for our non-technical roles to use?

As you explore your options, think about the user experience. Are the CRM’s most important fields and functions clearly labeled? Can marketing and customer service teams access and act on the data?

Intuitive UX is one part of the equation, but what it unlocks is the real question. Your CRM can’t be a source of dread or confusion. Every team should be able to access the same data. If they can’t, your CRM isn’t doing its job.

2. Will it scale with my business?

A small business can do a lot of things manually that a larger one can’t. So as you shop, pay attention to each CRM’s automation options, even the ones you won’t need right away.

“The most valuable feature in a CRM to our clients is by far workflow automation,” says Jay Larson, director of engineering at Tomorrow. “Having the ability to automatically perform a specific action based on triggers or events can take the legwork out of menial tasks.”

It also reduces the need for expensive custom developer work—a big win for your bottom line.

3. Does it integrate well with my existing tech stack?

As you’ll be pulling in data from different sources, choose a CRM that has integrations with the tools you use. This is especially important if you’re using ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Square, as these tools hold lots of rich customer data.

“The most valuable feature of a CRM is its ability to keep track of all customer information and the relationship history in one place,” says Kenneth Ott, co-founder of Metacake. “It must do this automatically, without much human intervention, and it must allow the information to be easily actionable by our teams and systems.”

Klaviyo integrates with over 350 tools, creating more opportunities to segment data and personalize campaigns in real time.

4. Can it handle B2C data volume and speed?

Most B2B companies have lower volumes and higher order values. But B2C brands can expect to process thousands of ongoing interactions across multiple channels.

Assess if your CRM can consistently process these interactions, in real time. Even an hour of interruption can cost you tons of money. For example, Best Buy reportedly lost millions in revenue when their site went down for 3 hours during a flash promotion in 2015. 

If your CRM can’t reliably log critical data, you miss out on critical information like how many specific users interacted with your brand.

5. Does it offer ecommerce-specific features?

A purpose-built B2C CRM should understand the unique dynamics of online retail out of the box. This includes native support for essential ecommerce metrics like average order value, customer lifetime value, repurchase rates, and product affinity scores.

You should also have the option to build abandoned cart recovery flows, browse abandonment triggers, post-purchase engagement sequences, and product recommendation engines.

And you should be able to easily integrate with your ecommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, your point of sale system like Square, and any number of ecommerce applications you use to run your business. 

6. How well does it support personalization?

Evaluate potential CRMs to understand how deep they go in terms of personalization. Can you get a complete view of your customer data, such as browsing history and category affinity across channels? If not, it’ll be hard for you to deliver personalization at scale.

“The ability to access data without having to put in a formal request is amazing,” says Grace Robinson, senior content marketing manager at X Agency. “It definitely helps support an agile marketing strategy.”

That said, your ecommerce CRM should let even non-technical users view, analyze, and act on customer data. Look for platforms that make it easy to set up automations, segment data, and build detailed reports—without looping in your data team.

Put customers first by listening and delivering at scale

For far too long, B2C brands have been forced to adapt to CRM systems that weren’t built for them. They’ve cobbled together different tools, struggled with fragmented data, and watched critical insights slip through the cracks.

That’s why we built Klaviyo B2C CRM from the ground up. It’s the only B2C CRM made for ecommerce businesses that want to unify and act on their customer data to create exceptional customer experiences.