Path to purchase research: what it is and how video reveals what surveys miss

What is the path to purchase?

The path to purchase is the route a person takes from first becoming aware of a need or product, through researching options, to making the buying decision and the experience that follows. It's also called the customer journey or the buyer decision journey.

This route matters because it's where every consumer-facing decision a brand makes either works or doesn't. Marketing, product design, packaging, the store experience, post-purchase service. Each moment along the journey shapes whether someone buys, returns, recommends, or churns. To improve any of those moments, you have to understand what's actually happening in them.

Why is the path to purchase non-linear today?

Because people don't buy the way the diagrams suggest. The journey loops, doubles back, pauses for days, and switches between phones, laptops, friends, stores, and screens. A Google and IPSOS study of 4,200 consumers found that for most product categories, only around 11% of buyers were strictly "online" and around 12% were strictly "offline". The overwhelming majority moved between the two.

Several things drive this complexity at once. Devices have multiplied, so a single decision might touch a phone in the kitchen, a laptop at work, and a tablet on the sofa. Information sources have multiplied too: search engines, social platforms, peer recommendations, expert reviews, brand websites, in-store displays. And brand interactions happen across all of them, often inconsistently. A positive in-store experience can be undone by a frustrating support call later, or vice versa.

What this means for research: a study that only captures one channel (only the online moment, or only the in-store moment) misses where most of the action actually happens.

What are the stages of the path to purchase?

There are five generally accepted stages, drawn from the buyer decision process originally described by John Dewey in 1910 and developed by marketing scholars including Philip Kotler.

• Awareness. A person becomes aware of a need, problem, or new option. Triggers include advertising, word of mouth, social media, a passing observation, or personal experience.
• Consideration. They actively look for information about possible solutions. They explore options, read content, and compare in a loose, undirected way.
• Evaluation. Options narrow. The person assesses pros and cons against their own criteria: price, quality, fit, trust, peer reviews, expert opinion.
• Purchase decision. A choice gets made. The decision can still be disrupted at the last moment by a checkout problem, a price comparison, an out-of-stock product, or a competing recommendation.
• Post-purchase experience. Use, satisfaction, returns, support, and word of mouth. This stage feeds back into the awareness and consideration stages of the next person, and into whether this person buys again.

These stages are useful as a frame, but real journeys rarely move through them cleanly. People can be in two stages at once, skip a stage entirely, or loop back from evaluation to consideration when something new enters the picture.

How do online and offline paths to purchase differ?

The touchpoints and pain points differ sharply across the two paths. Designing research that accounts for both is the only way to see the full journey.

Knowing where the touchpoints and pain points sit in each path lets you tailor what you measure, what you fix, and what you ask. A good shopper experience is rarely all online or all offline. It's the joins between them, where most of the friction lives.

How can video research help you understand the path to purchase?

Surveys and interviews capture what someone remembers. Video research captures what they did, in the moment, in their own environment. That difference is the gap between a tidy retrospective narrative and the actual messy, hesitant, distracted journey people take when they're buying things.

Three video methods cover different parts of the path. A fourth piece, analysis, turns the recordings into something a stakeholder can use.

Capturing behaviour as it happens

When a participant records themselves opening a delivery, comparing two products on a shelf, or scrolling through a brand's website, you see the journey as it unfolds. Subtle cues (a pause before adding to cart, a quick switch to a competitor's tab, a half-finished thought said out loud) surface naturally on video and rarely come up in a follow-up interview.

For online journeys, mobile screen recording with voice-over is the strongest tool. Participants record their screen as they shop, talking through what they're looking at. You see exactly which navigation paths they take, where they get stuck, and what they consider before deciding. This is particularly useful in the awareness and consideration stages, where the most interesting decisions are the small, unconscious ones.

Reading emotional and contextual cues

Video research goes beyond what people say to how they say it. Facial expressions, tone of voice, hesitation, body language. These provide context that words alone can't. A participant might say a checkout flow is "fine" while their video shows them sighing and going back to the previous page three times.

Diary study tasks are useful here. Participants record short videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts as they go through their day, sharing their thoughts and feelings as decisions unfold. You get an unfiltered window into not just what they did, but why, and how they felt about it.

Seeing the in-store experience

For the offline path, in-store video brings researchers into the moment without being physically present. Participants record themselves walking through a shop, narrating what catches their eye, what they pick up, what they put back, what they buy.

This is where the influence of store layout, product placement, and staff interaction becomes visible. You see how a shopper's path moves through the aisles, where they pause, what they read on packaging, what they compare side by side. Combined with online screen-recording from the same participant earlier or later in the journey, you get a connected view across the full omnichannel path. This is the kind of evidence shopper experience research and journey mapping projects are built on.

Analysing path-to-purchase data

Capturing video is only half the job. Making sense of dozens or hundreds of recordings used to mean weeks of manual transcription, watching, tagging, and clipping. AI changes that.

Indeemo's AI-powered analysis tools automatically transcribe and translate videos in 30+ languages, detect themes and sentiment across submissions, and surface patterns across the journey. You can filter by stage, search for moments where a specific product or competitor came up, and build a subtitled highlight reel of the most telling clips to share with stakeholders.

That last part matters. Numbers in a deck rarely change minds the way thirty seconds of a real shopper saying "I almost bought it but the shipping cost ruined it" does. Video evidence makes the journey concrete for the people who need to act on it.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between online and offline path-to-purchase research?

Online path-to-purchase research focuses on the digital journey: search, product pages, reviews, app and website navigation, checkout. It's typically captured through mobile screen recording. Offline research focuses on the in-store experience: store layout, shelf interaction, staff conversations, the moment of purchase. It's typically captured through in-store video. A full omnichannel study combines both, so you can see how the same shopper moves between digital and physical moments.

How long does a typical path-to-purchase study run?

It depends on the journey you're studying. A short purchase decision (everyday groceries, a quick app purchase) might run for a few days. A high-consideration purchase (a car, a holiday, a piece of tech) might run for several weeks, capturing each stage as it unfolds. Most studies sit somewhere in between: one to three weeks of fieldwork.

What does video research add that surveys can't capture?

Surveys ask people what they did. Video shows you what they did. The difference is significant. People misremember sequences, simplify complex decisions, and post-rationalise things they did instinctively. Video captures the hesitation, the comparison, the distraction, and the moment of decision. All the things a survey question can't reach.

Can you study the full omnichannel journey (online and offline) in a single study?

Yes. With Indeemo you can give the same participant a mix of tasks: mobile screen recording for the online moments, video diary tasks for what happens in between, and in-store video for the physical journey. You see the full path through one shopper's eyes, then compare across many shoppers to find patterns.

The path to purchase is more nuanced than a five-stage diagram suggests. Real shoppers move through it in their own way, on their own timing, across whatever channels suit them at the moment. Video research is one of the few methods that lets you see that journey honestly: the pauses, the doubts, the small decisions that drive the big ones.

If you'd like to talk about a path-to-purchase study, get in touch. We're happy to help you scope it.