There’s a bias in ecommerce that’s easy to fall into: listening most to the customers who talk the most. The ones who email support, leave detailed reviews, request features, or engage heavily on social media.
But there’s a problem with this approach. Your loudest customers often aren’t your best customers.
The Quiet Majority
Your best customers—the ones with high lifetime value, low return rates, and genuine satisfaction—are often quietly going about their business. They find what they need, buy it, use it, and come back when they need more.
They don’t email you because nothing went wrong. They don’t leave reviews because they’re busy. They don’t request features because your product already does what they need.
This silence is actually the highest compliment. But it’s easy to mistake it for indifference.
The Vocal Minority Problem
Meanwhile, the customers who demand the most attention often represent edge cases. They want features that serve their specific use case. They have complaints rooted in expectations that don’t match your offering. They’re price-sensitive in ways your core customers aren’t.
When you optimize for these voices, you can inadvertently make decisions that hurt the silent majority who actually sustain your business.
How This Plays Out in Design
We’ve seen brands add complexity to their checkout because vocal customers requested more options. The result? Conversion dropped for everyone else.
We’ve seen brands change their value proposition to address complaints from price-sensitive shoppers—and confuse the premium customers who were happy to pay more for quality.
We’ve seen brands add features to satisfy power users, creating friction for the casual buyers who represent 80% of revenue.
Finding the Signal
This doesn’t mean ignoring customer feedback. It means contextualizing it.
When you hear a request or complaint, ask: Who is this customer? What’s their lifetime value? How representative are they of our core audience?
When you see patterns in support tickets, consider: Are these issues affecting our best customers, or are they filtering in customers who aren’t a good fit?
Proactive Research
The solution is to actively seek input from your quiet customers—the ones who don’t naturally reach out.
Post-purchase surveys, strategically timed. Brief interviews with repeat buyers. Analysis of behavior patterns among high-value customers. These give you insight into what’s working for the people who matter most.
Designing for Your Core
Once you understand who your best customers really are, you can design experiences that serve them specifically.
This might mean making choices that your vocal minority won’t like. That’s okay. You can’t optimize for everyone, and trying to do so usually means optimizing for no one.
The brands that sustain growth understand this trade-off. They know who they’re for, they design for those people intentionally, and they’re at peace with not being for everyone else.