Sashank RavindranathNot everything is A-OK after your customers complete their purchase with your e-commerce store and are awaiting their orders. It is at this stage, where even the ones who have been most excited to shop with your store can get disappointed and end up in a position where they refuse to shop with you once again.
If you’re wondering why this happens, the retail pundits have a term for it — post-purchase dissonance.
But what really is ‘post-purchase dissonance’?
What is Post-purchase Dissonance?
Post-purchase dissonance is simply the buyer’s remorse that happens particularly in cases of online purchases. It is a sense of regret for the customer, who feels they’ve made a hasty or wrong decision after completing a purchase with an e-commerce business.
Customers who have experienced post-purchase dissonance may frequently feel the urge to cancel their purchase, initiate a return, or in the worst case, even post a sharply-worded review on social media.
Dissonance in the post-purchase phase can happen due to internal conflicts such as
- Indecision over having chosen one from two products of the same business
- Indecision over two having chosen one from two competing businesses
Realizing the plan to spend their budget on other expenses that have lined up at the same time.
Post-purchase dissonance can also occur due to external reasons that involve something to do with you. Let’s take a look at them as well.
Post-purchase dissonance is a sense of regret for the customer, who feels they’ve made a hasty or wrong decision after completing a purchase with an e-
Reasons for post-purchase dissonance
- Your customers feel unsatisfied with the product or customer service you provide, leading to a bad order experience associated with your brand.
- Your customers did first-hand or second-hand research after their purchase which puts your brand experience sub-par, to that of your competitors.
- Your customer finds a negative review about your brand or product that they recently purchased.
Effects of post-purchase dissonance on your e-commerce business
- Increase in unwanted returns – 70% of all returns are size and fit related.
- Decrease in customer satisfaction – 78% of shoppers won’t buy from a brand again after ONE bad delivery or return experience.
- Increase in support tickets created – 40% of customer support inquiries are WISMO (Where Is My Order) or RETURN related.
- Decrease in brand credibility – 30% of consumers who have had a negative customer experience say they would share it on social media.
- Increase in customer acquisition costs – It costs 5x to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.
It is clear that your e-commerce business can stand to lose a lot of your customers due to your customers’ psychological discomfort.
But remember, the approach you take can be different if the customer is in the early stages of the funnel and is just casually browsing through your e-commerce website. Things are really serious when a customer has made a purchase but yet decided to cancel or return it.
This is where you must immediately step in and take efforts to provide a great post-purchase experience and use it to mitigate the impact of post-purchase dissonance.
How a Great Post-purchase Experience Can Reduce the Impact of Dissonance
During times like the holiday season, your CX can play a differentiating factor amidst the long list of competition. However, brands such as yours unintentionally leave out the CX opportunities in the post-purchase or what comes ‘after customers hit the buy button’ in search of acquiring customers and maximizing sales.
The post-purchase takes up 50% of the overall order experience, so ignoring it is not an option.
However, you must keep in mind that it costs 5x to acquire new customers while returning customers spend 30% more than new customers.
Quality post-purchase experiences assures customers that they’ve chosen the right brand and prove to be helps you compensate for any product-related incidents, if any. Also, customers who have faced a delightful post-purchase experience will share their feedback on social media — assuring confidence in customers facing dissonance.
Given that it’s never too late to provide delightful post-purchase experiences, you can definitely try out some last-minute post-purchase techniques to reduce dissonance for this holiday season and beyond.
Last-minute Techniques to Reduce Dissonance for This Holiday Season and Beyond
Today’s customers have been spoiled by choices and have increased expectations on order deliveries to the extent that brands going out of their way to provide great experiences have become the bare minimum.
One such expectation from customers is the ability to track their orders at all times. But imagine a scenario where the order’s current status hasn’t been updated or a supposed delay wasn’t informed.
During times like the holiday season, 82% of the shoppers are worried about their orders NOT reaching them on time. Thus, even when everything is going alright, customers’ worries can end up affecting their delivery expectations.
This can soon result in bad delivery experiences and cause customers to stop shopping with you without hesitation.
So if you want to mitigate the impact of post-purchase dissonance, you have to start with being transparent with your order tracking, including delays.
With post-purchase automation platforms such as LateShipment.com, you can enable customers to track their orders at all times on your branded tracking page. Not just to keep your customers aware of their parcel status, you can plug your tracking pages with marketing campaigns to boost repeat sales, given that on average, a customer tracks their order 4-6 times.
Apart from enabling your customers to track their orders, you can as well send post-purchase transactional Emails and SMS notifications to keep your customers in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle.
With LateShipment.com, you can seamlessly integrate with your email marketing tools to set triggers and automate shipping-related notifications to your customers.
You can also add an order-tracking widget anywhere on your website and make tracking self-service for your customers and free up your support time to focus on more pressing issues.
30% of the customer support team’s time and effort is WASTED handling repetitive delivery and return-related inquiries.
You can include product usage guides and explainer videos in your post-purchase emails for product-related dissonance and reduce unwanted order returns to a great extent.
Delivery issues are one of the major contributors and the thing about these issues is that they are inevitable even with the most efficient carriers and more common during times like the holiday season.
Up to 20% of shipments face issues such as late delivery, attempted-failed delivery, and loss or damage in transit during the peak season.
While you do not have control over such events, you can enable your support reps to proactively address post-purchase issues and take action to resolve them before such discrepancies impact your customers.
This can greatly increase customer confidence and set them on the path towards choosing your business, for the next time.
To know more about this and get started immediately, check out LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform. DEM can help you easily spot shipments facing issues, so your support agents can dive in where needed.
The best way to mitigate post-purchase dissonance is to understand the reason behind frequent customer frustrations and what might be a better option than asking your customers directly.
As the order is delivered or the return makes its way back to your e-commerce store, you can proceed to collect feedback from your customers regarding the post-purchase experience they’ve received and use these actionable insights to consistently direct efforts and improve brand credibility.
Apart from just helping you deliver delightful post-purchase experiences, LateShipment.com also helps you to capture delivery and returns feedback via ratings to understand from your customers the experience your brand delivered and perfect your post-purchase strategy.
35% of all products that are purchased from e-commerce retailers are returned.
In the worst case that the customer’s dissonance is due to faulty or unsatisfied expectations with your product, there is no option left for them rather than returning their order.
In such cases, the onus is on you to make sure that the returns process is not hard enough to infuriate your customers further. Also, on the contrary, 92% of shoppers say they will buy again if the returns process is easy.
Thus, give your customers the confidence to keep shopping with you by optimizing your returns process to be fast and easy in the form of:
- Easy-to-spot and detailed returns policy
- Self-serve returns with close to zero support interactions
- Proactive returns updates to keep customers in the loop
- Live returns tracking page to reduce customer anxiety, etc.
Mitigate the Impact of Post-purchase Dissonance to Increase Repeat Purchases
Now that you’re aware of what’s to be done, it’s time to make your move right before the holiday season arrives.
Make use of the last-minute essentials from this article to ensure that at the end of the day, your customer feels confident about their decision of choosing your brand, not just after hitting the ‘buy’ button but after they’ve received the orders in their hands as well.
And try not to antagonize returns. We understand that it’ll be quite hectic to handle them along with the already hectic holiday season. But remember, they hold incredible power to boost your bottom line and create loyal customers for life.
If you still have second thoughts, you can read more on how post-purchase helps in boosting retention and revenue in our holiday e-commerce guide or simply talk to our product expert to understand LateShipment.com’s role in it.
That’s all from us! It’s now up to you to do what it takes and enjoy the fruits of Holiday season success.
Happy Holidays!
