Product Journey Walkthrough

The Product Journey report is a powerful visualization tool in Lifetimely that helps you understand how repeat customers engage with your products over time. By identifying common purchase paths across first, second, third, and fourth orders, you can uncover patterns that would be nearly impossible to spot in a spreadsheet.

This guide will show you how to read and customize the Product Journey, explain the difference between visual and data-level filters like "Hide noisy products" and "Exclude [X] product", and explore real-world use cases to drive decisions in product development, marketing, and retention.

Why Use the Product Journey Report?

Every customer’s journey is unique but patterns emerge when you zoom out!

For example:

• Do customers who start with a bundle tend to repurchase individual items?
• Are certain products more likely to lead to long-term retention?
• Which first-time products lead to high-value second and third orders?

The Product Journey helps you answer these types of questions by visualizing the most common product paths that returning customers take across multiple orders. The thicker the connecting line (or "noodle") between products, the more frequent the path.

Reading the Report: What to Look For

You can access your Product Journey from the drop-down menu of “Customer Behavior” reports in the side menu bar.

Each Product Journey tells a visual story of how customers progress from one product to the next.

Example insights:

• Product popularity: Which items show up consistently across multiple orders?
• Repurchase likelihood: Do customers tend to reorder the same item or switch to a related product?
• Retention signals: Which products are associated with longer customer lifecycles?

Below is an example Product Journey from one of our test stores. This report shows the  most frequent buying patterns of the store's returning customers over the last 48 months. (Remember - we're only focused on the buying behavior of repeat customers, so customers who only placed one order in the report's time period are excluded.)

Every Product Journey consists of four columns. The first column on the left shows the most common products purchased on a customer's first order. Each bar in the column represents a different product and the size of each bar is proportional to that product’s percentage of total sales.

The next column displays the most common products purchased on a second order. Since we're looking at repeat customers only, there should be at least as many second orders as first orders, and the two columns are equal in size. But when we move to the next column displaying the most common third order products, you can see from the size of the bars that there are fewer third order sales. And by the fourth order column, repeat sales have dropped off enough to where only three products are displayed at this level of zoom.

We'll look at these columns more closely in a minute, but now let's focus on the links that run between the columns. These paths or “noodles” track the most common sequences of repeat sales. The thicker noodles correspond to the most common paths. In the example above, you can see that the thickest noodle links the Vegan Plant Shake Milk Tea in the first and second columns. This means that customers who ordered a Vegan Plant Shake Milk Tea on their first order were very likely to order the same product on their second order. They weren't nearly as likely to buy a Party Value Pack on their second order, as you can tell from the much thinner noodle linking those products.

So without looking at a single number, you can already start seeing patterns and answering basic questions. Here are some questions that any Product Journey should help answer:

• What products are popular with repeat customers?
• For customers who buy product A, how likely they are to repurchase A vs ordering product B or C?
• Which products tend to retain customers, and which tend to discourage reorders?

Of course, to answer any of these questions, it helps to have more detail. To see exact numbers for different products and paths on your Product Journey, you can hover your cursor over any part of the chart:

Hovering over a product in any column:

• The product's share of total orders in its column
  • The% of purchases in X sequence order" refers to the percentage of the total order count for that specific sequence. For example, if it says "7% of purchases as 2nd order," it means that out of all second orders placed within the product journey across all products, 7% of those second orders included product X.
• The average number of days since the previous order
• The average number of days until the next order
• The most common customer paths to and from that product

Hovering over any path will give you:

• The exact number of customers who purchased the linked products in sequence.

Clicking on a product:

• Graph summary of the data in the noodle

How to customize your Product Journey report

1

Adjust the time period

To change the time period of the report, just click on the "Time period" window, where you can select from pre-set date ranges or select your own customized date range. 

💡 Shorter ranges are good for spotting recent trends or impacts from new products. Longer ranges help establish statistically significant patterns and long-term behaviors.

2

View chart by product, variant, product type, SKU, order tag or vendor

The "Product Journey by" setting allows you to set the level at which your products are displayed:

The right setting for you depends on your catalog and on the buying behavior of your customers. Generally, it's best to select the lowest level at which there are meaningful differences in your number of orders.

3

Zoom to different levels of detail

Adjusting the Zoom slider of your Product Journey controls how much detail you want the graph to show. A default report is zoomed all the way in - this means that uncommon paths are removed completely so you can focus more on common paths. As you zoom out, it takes fewer orders for a path to display on the chart

4

Filters

Leverage Filters on the top right of the screen to take a deep dive into specific a product journey, based on 'x' filter e.g. view certain products or order tags etc

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Hide Noisy Products vs Exclude [X] Product

Hide Noisy Products

This is a visual-only filter. It helps clean up the chart by automatically hiding low-volume or irregular products that rarely appear in repeat customer journeys. These products are still included in the dataset—they’re just not shown in the visual to reduce clutter.

✅ Use when: You want a clearer view of product trends without removing any underlying data.

Exclude [X] Product

This is a data-level filter. It removes a selected product entirely from the report, as if it was never purchased. This changes the calculation of all product paths and metrics.

✅ Use when: You want to analyze the customer journey without the influence of specific products like freebies, test items, bundles, or one-off anomalies.

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Final Thoughts

The Product Journey isn’t just a chart, it’s a tool to guide smarter decisions.

By surfacing the most common paths your customers take across orders, you can:

• Identify star products
• Improve retention strategies
• Optimize upsells and cross-sells
• Invest smarter in marketing and inventory

Explore different timeframes, zoom levels, and filters to see what patterns emerge in your store.

Need help interpreting your Product Journey? Reach out to us at hello@lifetimely.io anytime.