How pre-purchase transparency boosts ecommerce retention rates
When customers lack clarity around their purchases, it can cost your brand big-time. The average ecommerce return rate hovers around 30% in some categories – and processing a return can cost up to 65% of the item’s total value.
If you’re not providing your shoppers with the right level of transparency when it comes to your products, you’ll likely end up in the red – with a mountain of unwanted inventory heading straight to a landfill. What’s more, a negative experience with your brand means that your shoppers aren’t coming back, leading to higher churn rates and customer acquisition costs.
How to course-correct? It starts by building transparency into your pre-purchase experience. Here’s how to do that.
Retention starts before the first order
If you’re like most brands, you’re investing heavily in post‑purchase retention through loyalty programs, email and SMS campaigns, and win-back campaigns. But you may be overlooking your low-hanging fruit: your customers’ first encounters with your brand. After all, that’s when trust is built – or lost.
Focus on establishing pre-purchase clarity as a key business strategy. That means prioritizing transparency in every element of your customers’ brand interactions, including on your product description pages, in the shopping cart, and during checkout. Customers should feel confident that they understand the product details, the total cost, when the item will arrive, and how to navigate the returns process if they need to. Failing to deliver on any of these fronts means that shoppers are far less likely to complete a transaction in the first place.
Four pillars of pre‑purchase clarity
Product clarity, cost clarity, delivery clarity, and returns clarity are four key levers that will help your brand reduce returns and fuel retention. Let’s cover how to address each one.
Fit and product clarity
How many times have your customers sent back apparel or footwear because they didn’t fit as intended? Or maybe the color looked different in person compared to the images they saw online. Poor fit and mismatched expectations frequently drive returns across apparel, footwear, and lifestyle categories – but these returns are entirely avoidable.
Start with your PDPs: For each product, you should offer detailed sizing guidance, clear product photography, comparison guidance, FAQs on fit and material, and transparent messaging that targets your ideal customer persona. You can also include customer reviews and UGC including photos and videos directly on the product page, giving your customers a better sense of how the product works in the real world.
To improve your PDPs, look at your returns data insights to understand why products are coming back, and address the root cause. Loop’s Analytics tool helps you understand when a particular product runs large or small, for instance, so you can be sure to proactively warn customers to size up or down before making a purchase.
Cost clarity
Nothing kills a buyer’s excitement faster than adding a product they’ve been hunting for to their shopping cart, only to discover that the shipping fees double the cost of their purchase. As a result, they’ll simply abandon their shopping cart, and you’ll miss out on a shopper who genuinely wanted to buy from you.
To curb your cart abandonment rate, it’s important to be upfront with your fees, even before the shopper adds the item to their cart. By including a field where the customer can add their zip code directly on the product page, they can find out the all-in cost to deliver any item to their door, helping them narrow down their options to those that make the most financial sense.
You can also help smooth over cost concerns around shipping by offering free shipping above a certain purchase threshold, such as $50 or $100. Doing so will provide extra incentive for shoppers to add more items to their cart, helping you generate more upsells during the transaction.
Delivery clarity
Don’t stress out about same-day or even next-day delivery – most customers don’t need their items immediately, but they do want certainty around their arrival date. In a recent McKinsey survey, transparency around shipping was consumers’ number two priority – second only to shipping cost. By focusing on transparency, rather than speed, in your delivery process, you’ll be able to boost confidence in your brand and increase your repeat purchase rate.
Using Loop’s Delivery Promise, you’ll be able to satisfy your shoppers with accurate estimated delivery dates and a smooth logistics process across the entire shopping journey, even on PDPs and in checkout flows, creating confidence that their items will arrive when they need them. With Loop Tracking they’ll receive regular order tracking updates based on real-time data from your carrier, so they’ll always know if an estimate has changed – and you’ll have the tools at hand to offer proactive messaging and responses to ensure satisfaction through the journey.
Returns clarity
Shoppers return products for all kinds of reasons, and it’s not necessarily because they don’t like your brand. By implementing clear, shopper‑friendly return policies, you can boost trust, conversion, and repeat purchases. The opposite is just as true: In fact, 89% of shoppers say they’d be unlikely to make another purchase from a brand if they’d had a difficult returns experience.
Before making a purchase, shoppers want to understand whether they’ll be able to return a product easily if it doesn’t work for them. Be upfront, with clear and readable return policies that define your return criteria for each product category. Clarify if shoppers need to pay a return fee, or if your brand will cover the costs. For extra peace of mind around the returns process, you can give your shoppers the option to purchase Checkout+, an optional returns protection plan that asks shoppers to pay a small upfront fee to be guaranteed a free return later if they need it.
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Instilling pre-purchase clarity across every element of your customer journey will help your shoppers build trust in your brand, leading to higher customer satisfaction and more repeat purchases.
Ready to explore how Loop’s tools can help you power a pre‑purchase clarity strategy that reduces returns and turns first‑time buyers into long‑term customers? Get in touch!
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