The Importance of Post-Purchase Experiences for Your Business

Post-purchase behavior is how customers react after they complete the checkout process. Ensuring a positive customer post-purchase experience is critical if you run an e-commerce business. The Post Purchase Experience can provide information on whether your services have met customer needs and expectations, whether customers will return to shop at your store in the future, or if they will recommend products or services to others such as friends or family. That's why it's so important to provide customers with a positive post-purchase experience.

What is a Post-Purchase Experience?

If you're looking for the meaning of post-purchase experience or post-purchase behavior, you may come across several flowcharts and graphs that try to explain exactly what post-purchase behavior actually means. The meaning of post purchase behavior itself is the things we want buyers to do, and things we don't want after the customer makes a purchase.

Post-purchase behaviors desired by business owners include repeated purchases, positive reviews, and recommendations to friends or family while unwanted post-purchase behaviors include product refunds, negative reviews, purchases made only once without repeat orders.

More specifically, after customers make a purchase, they will enter the post-purchase evaluation stage. During this stage, customers decide whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the service you provide. There are many things that can go wrong for customers such as post-purchase emails, delays or errors in delivery as well as problems with the product itself. Therefore you should handle the post-purchase experience very carefully.

Why is the Post-Purchase Experience Important You Should Consider?

There are a number of reasons why e-commerce business owners should adopt a post-purchase process that is good for their customers. For example, an order management process that provides customers with order status updates and a complete return process - will help ensure your customers have a positive experience. The post-purchase experience can also avoid the risk of you getting negative feedback from customers or worse, decreasing your business credibility.

The post-purchase experience for customers can be very influential in their decision to become repeat customers in your business. Therefore, improving the post-purchase experience can be your reference for getting repeat customers in the future.

By focusing on the post-purchase experience, you can do a lot more than just prevent customer dissatisfaction. Done right, the post-purchase customer experience can build loyalty, increase the popularity of word of mouth, and increase the profits you get from repeat customers.

Examples of Post-Purchase Behaviors You Can Do to Encourage Repeat Purchase

Apart from improving the return experience, there are actually many post-purchase behaviors or services you can do to get your customers to come back and buy from you. Here are some post-purchase behaviors you can apply to your business.

Encouraging Loyalty

Encouraging customer loyalty is one example of a post-purchase experience you can use. You can offer loyalty points for every activity carried out by customers such as when they create an account, make repeat purchases, follow your business social media accounts, and more. Offer those loyalty points to give customers an advantage they can use to shop again on your website. That way, customers will benefit and you can also benefit. Powerful win-win solution, right?

Impressive Return Process

If a customer is dissatisfied with an item they purchased for some reason, and feels the need to process a return, this process should be simplified and as hassle-free as possible for the customer. This is an important point where any wrong step in the process can damage the relationship between your customer and your business.

So why are returns such an important part of the post-purchase experience? In a study conducted by 5874 commerce in which they ordered goods from 100 different retailers or stores and analyzed their return process, the following conclusions were drawn:

- Only 34% of business or store owners mention returns on their confirmation email.
- About 47% of business or store owners offer free return service or postage
- The average number of return options offered to customers is 1.91.
- As many as 86% of business owners have a return portal mentioned in the header or footer, however, only 15% of them have a return portal mentioned in the main section of their website homepage.
- The average payback period offered to customers is 40.49 days.

From the information above you can certainly find out information about returns made by various businesses, and if you want to grow your business of course the return process must be simple and the return portal must be clearly visible to customers and easily accessible.

E-Commerce Business Return Solutions

Some examples of return solutions that your e-commerce business can implement to improve the post-purchase experience are:

Pay close attention to feedback or feedback from customers and the reviews they give to your products and services. Use this information to improve the products you currently sell and the services you currently provide.
Make the return process easy so that customers have the smoothest and most free return experience possible, such as contactless returns, drop-off or delivery point information, in-app returns and more.
Perform product quality testing as often as possible, especially on products that are returned most often.
Maintain consistent contact or communication between you and the customer and don't forget to provide updates on the shipping and return stages they are going through.

If you want to encourage repeat purchases, don't avoid risking customer returns. As everyone who has bought something knows, sometimes the item purchased is damaged during shipping, doesn't match or doesn't match the description.

In this case, your customers usually get a product they don't want. The best thing you can do in this situation is to encourage the customer to make an exchange rather than a refund. It may sound difficult, but if you use software like ReturnKeys to make returns and exchanges easy, you can get your regulars back to make purchases.

Using return-only software, customers can visit the returns portal and select an option if they wish to make an exchange. From there, they'll get the information and print a return label if needed to ship the item back to your warehouse. So, don't underestimate or not even do post-purchase service to customers because this point is very important for business owners to pay attention to.

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