How to Improve the After-Sales Experience in Your Online Store

Most online stores devote all their effort to closing the sale. What happens afterwards… God will tell. But, that is precisely where it is decided whether that customer comes back or disappears forever.

When a person clicks on the "confirm order" button, the shopping experience has not ended: it has just entered its most decisive phase.

During the following days, while waiting for their order, that customer is building an opinion about your store, which will determine everything that happens afterwards. If that opinion is good, you have a customer with the potential to return. But if it is bad, you will probably never see them in your store again and, what is worse, they are also likely to tell others about it.

But this can be quantified with data: 32% of shoppers abandon a brand after just one bad after-sales experience, according to PwC. Add to that the fact that acquiring a new customer costs between 5 and 25 times more than retaining one who has already purchased before. If there is one thing to improve in your store, this is the place where doing so provides the greatest return... so make it a priority!

The first message the customer receives after paying is the one with the highest open rate (usually above 70%) of all the messages you will send throughout their customer lifecycle. Keep in mind that they are expecting it with the order still fresh in their mind. What do eCommerce businesses usually do? Simply cover the basics with four lines including the order number and the total amount. Doesn't that seem like a wasted opportunity?

With minimal effort, you can do something much more useful: confirm the order, anticipate the next steps ("within 24 hours you will receive the tracking number"), add a direct tracking link and even write two lines that sound human. A short, friendly paragraph does more for brand perception than any corporate template with a full-colour logo.

Here are some examples of transactional after-sales emails that will serve as inspiration.

An important part of the anxiety and friction generated by any online purchase has to do with the "shipping limbo". The money has left the account, but the product is not yet in their hands, and meanwhile they do not know exactly what is happening or when it will arrive.

Proactively anticipating that uncertainty is much more effective than reacting when the customer has already written asking about it. You can automate the workflow with notifications sent when the order leaves the warehouse, when it is out for delivery and when it has been delivered.

There are also tools such as Aftership or Sendcloud that allow you, in addition to automating those notifications, to personalise them with your brand image. This is more important than it seems because, if the only tracking email your customer receives is the carrier's, the experience they will remember will be that of SEUR or Correos, at the moment when they are paying the closest attention to the process.

More than half of online shoppers consider ease of returns a key factor in their purchasing decision, according to the DeliveryX Returns 2024 report.

There are still stores that insist on setting obstacles in the returns process, thinking that this will prevent lost sales. The reality is that they are achieving exactly the opposite.

A smooth process builds trust before the customer has even purchased, namely:

And there is an additional advantage that is not always properly appreciated: the return stage is a highly valuable source of information. A simple text field where the customer explains why they are returning the item gives you free product feedback that no survey will ever provide with such honesty.

Very few stores work on after-sales content, and it really is a pity, because the impact on customer satisfaction is very direct. Something as simple as a user tutorial, an assembly video, a maintenance guide, recipes if you sell food, ideas for combining products if you sell fashion... content that helps the customer get the most out of what they have just bought.

The immediate objective at this stage is not to keep selling—that moment has already passed—but to reinforce the idea that the customer made a good decision. Companies that accompany purchases with educational after-sales content increase retention by 29%, according to HubSpot. And it makes perfect sense: someone who knows how to use what they bought properly is unlikely to return it, almost never regrets the purchase and has plenty to say when someone asks where they bought it.

An email three or four days after delivery is the simplest format. The channel matters least; what matters is reaching the customer when they already have the product in their hands and are eager to start using it.

You already know that reviews are essential for any online store, but the way they are requested is often so generic and persistent that customers ignore them (or even perceive them as some kind of annoying spam).

There are three adjustments that make the difference:

Building customer loyalty in eCommerce can be summarised like this: the customer buys from you again, and does so within a reasonable period. Therefore, the period between the first and second purchase is one of the clearest indicators that the after-sales experience is working. If that time becomes too long or there is simply no second purchase... something in the process is clearly failing.

The most direct tool for shortening the time between orders is the reactivation email: a personalised message sent between 2 and 4 weeks after the first purchase.

2 or 4? Indeed, this period is flexible because it depends greatly on the type of product. If you sell coffee beans and the usual order lasts three weeks, the email has to arrive before the container is empty. If you sell clothing, the cycle is different: reactivation may make more sense when linked to a new collection or a change of season.

The content of the message is also key. A recommendation based on what the customer has already purchased always works better than a generic offer: if someone bought a tent from you, it makes more sense to show them sleeping bags or sleeping mats than the complete catalogue of your sports store, doesn't it? To do this, you have email marketing tools that allow you to segment and automate these mailings without having to work with customer data manually, one customer at a time.

If you are wondering whether you should send them an offer... I will tell you that discounts are a resource that works, but, of course, they have a cost: they get the customer used to waiting for an offer as an incentive to buy again. Before resorting to that, try other levers: early access to new products, exclusive content related to their previous purchase, or simply a message showing that you remember what they bought and that you have something that may interest them.

Sixty percent of consumers admit that they are more likely to buy again when the experience has been personalised. In this case, customization means that the message makes sense to that person based on what they have already purchased, and that the recipient feels it is different from a generic email sent to an entire mailing list.