Why Is the Customer Journey More Fragmented Than Ever?
A fragmented customer experience is becoming the default rather than the exception, as shoppers spread a single purchase decision across more touchpoints than most retail systems were built to track. Each new channel or loyalty tier adds a seam where context about the customer gets lost.
More than half of shoppers consult two to three channels for mid-tier purchases like apparel, sporting goods and beauty, and 20% check four to six, according to a Salsify report cited by eMarketer [1].
That is not casual browsing. It is a customer moving between a retailer's app, its website, a marketplace listing, a loyalty portal and possibly a store, often within the same purchase. Every one of those stops can hold a different fragment of who that shopper is and what they already told the brand.
"The new journey is nonlinear, automated, and privacy-forward," said Tom Burke, CEO of identity-data firm AtData, in comments to eMarketer [1]. He added that the shift is pushing retailers toward identity-centric risk management: tools that verify customers earlier and reduce friction without sacrificing trust [1].
Loyalty Programs Are Multiplying, Not Consolidating
Retailers' answer to fragmentation has often been to launch another loyalty program, which tends to add complexity rather than remove it. Eighty-nine percent of retailers analyzed in Modern Retail's 2026 Index now have a loyalty program, free or paid, up from 79% the year before [2]. A separate March 2025 Salesforce survey found two-thirds of retailers already offered one, with 29% more planning to launch one within two years [2].
“I think brands that don't invest in loyalty and don't know their customer will have the same experience they did in the early Amazon days. If Amazon could take over your customer, so can ChatGPT.”
The structures are also getting more layered. Several large retailers now run more than one program at once, splitting consumer and professional audiences or free and paid tiers into separate systems that each need their own view of the customer.
Gartner retail analyst Brad Jashinsky noted that tying richer perks to spending thresholds, as Target did, helps retailers target "shoppers that are going to actually take advantage" of the premium tier, but said some chains still lag Amazon and Walmart in bundling ancillary services into membership [2].
The stakes go beyond points and discounts. Jen Jones, CMO at commerce platform Commercetools, told Modern Retail that brand loyalty is becoming more critical as AI shopping agents get better at completing purchases on a customer's behalf.
| Retailer | Loyalty structure | Recent move |
|---|---|---|
| Lowe's | Separate consumer and Pro tracks | Relaunched its Pro program as MyLowe's Pro Rewards in February 2025 [2] |
| Target | Free Circle plus paid Circle 360 | Offered a free year of Circle 360 to high-spend Circle members [2] |
| Barnes & Noble | Free and paid membership tiers | Paid tier adds benefits for its most frequent shoppers [2] |
| Macy's | Single tiered free program | Stopped enrollments in its paid Red Carpet tier [2] |
Why Hasn't the Fragmented Customer Experience Been Solved Already?
This is not a new problem; it is an old one that keeps resurfacing as channels multiply faster than the systems meant to unify them. Years before generative AI entered the retail conversation, a widely cited marketer survey already found that the complexity of customer touchpoints (46%) and the difficulty of unifying different data sources (43%) were the leading obstacles to building one integrated view of the customer journey [3].
Loyalty programs, ironically, often add to that same pile of disconnected systems instead of resolving it. A free tier, a paid tier and a professional tier can each run on different software with its own login, history and rules, which recreates the exact fragmentation a loyalty strategy is supposed to fix.
What Closes the Context Gap?
Closing the gap means treating customer, order and loyalty data as one connected record rather than as outputs of separate systems that need reconciling after the fact. David Dettmer, global CTO at CourtAvenue, told eMarketer that retailers are moving to merge real-time product availability, purchase history and campaign performance into unified measurement systems to improve forecasting and attribution [1].
Practical priorities for commerce and CX leaders going into 2027 planning:
None of this requires abandoning loyalty programs. It requires building them on commerce infrastructure where customer, order and catalog data already live in one place, so a new tier or channel is a new view of existing data rather than another silo to reconcile later.
- Treat loyalty tiers as views into one customer profile, not separate databases with separate logins.
- Resolve identity across channels before a purchase, not after a support ticket forces it.
- Make order status, inventory and purchase history visible to every channel in real time, not batch-synced overnight.
- Audit how many systems currently hold a fragment of the same customer's history, and start consolidating the ones causing the most repeat-yourself friction.
- Treat first-party loyalty data as a defense against losing the customer relationship to AI shopping agents, not just a discount mechanism.
Sources
- [1]EMARKETER, Retail tech to watch in 2026 — emarketer.com
- [2]Digiday, Digiday+ Research: Retailers take a more complex approach to loyalty — digiday.com
- [3]EMARKETER, Customers Are Using More Channels than Ever to Interact with Retailers — contentstorage-na1.emarketer.com
