The E-commerce Post-Purchase Experience. Personalized.

E-commerce retailers often provide a personalized shopping experience before and during the customer journey.

But what about post-purchase?

Personalized experiences allow shoppers to experience a personal touch with their orders, either for themselves or for a gift recipient. They experience the care and joy of unboxing an order that feels meant just for them.

Retailers that elevate the post-purchase experience with personalization offer something other than just another routine e-commerce order delivery.

Smaller e-commerce stores, such as those on Etsy or eBay, curate a highly personalized experience with hand-written notes, specialized packaging, coupons, and gift wrapping. These retailers are known for their personalized customer experiences. Easy enough for small boutique shops to do, right? What about when you need to scale to thousands of orders per day? 

The big box pre-purchase online shopping experience has become increasingly personalized. Memberships and rewards programs ensure retailers have customer details, and omnichannel customer relationship management tools make it easier to synthesize customer habits, preferences, searches, purchases, and product recommendations. Real-time communication and notifications keep shoppers aware of their ongoing relationship with the brand and their order statuses. 

When customer data flows through a solid, unified, and integrated omnichannel order management system, all the dots connect, and the customer experience feels seamless and coherent. 

Brands are getting good at personalizing the pre-shopping experience. But more often than not, once the order is placed and tracking information transmitted, the customer ends up receiving their order in just another brown box with (hopefully!) eco-friendly packaging materials.

It’s kind of like the warehouse just packed it up, tossed it on a truck, and the carrier delivered it to the porch. Suddenly, the highly personalized experience feels anything but. 

Yes, there are orders where customers truly want their order to show up, undamaged, and be accurate. But brands are missing out on an opportunity to keep that personalized shopping experience going, rather than having it drop off with a plain brown box on the doorstep. 

Think of it like this. Your customer feels known, seen, understood, supported, and helped by your brand during their shopping experience. All of these feelings foster customer loyalty. As humans, we like to feel cared for and known. These positive feelings are missing from the standard brown box delivery process. In fact, order delivery is typically a forgettable experience.

Except for brand logos, one brown box doesn’t look or feel much different than another. It could be any brand delivering the product to the customer. And that is what is at stake. 
 
When the personalization strategy drops off after purchase, your brand becomes forgettable. You want to be memorable, and nothing is more memorable in a digital world than the human touch. 

So far, we’ve referenced traditional doorstep order fulfillment. But store fulfillment can feel just as impersonal if it’s just another hurried employee handing the order across the counter in-store or at the curbside. For the most part, it’s akin to interacting with the carrier delivery driver. A quick hello and thank you. 

What makes a post-purchase order delivery feel personalized? Human connection and a little bit of tender loving care. 

At Radial, our value-added services include the following ways of making the unboxing experience personalized and delightful: 

If you do not have the staff or infrastructure to implement personalization at scale, consider partnering with a third-party logistics company to provide these added-value services.