Your 2026 D2C Calendar mapped day by day - Powered by real data from India’s biggest D2C shopping network
Your 2026 D2C Calendar mapped day by day - Powered by real data from India’s biggest D2C shopping network
Your 2026 D2C Calendar mapped day by day - Powered by real data from India’s biggest D2C shopping network
Your 2026 D2C Calendar mapped day by day - Powered by real data from India’s biggest D2C shopping network
Smart COD Suite
Reduce RTO By Improving Post Order Placement Customer Experience
27 Feb 2024
08 Min Read
Suhag spearheads D2C growth strategies at GoKwik, focusing on e-commerce optimisation, conversion funnels, and sales enablement. Based in Bengaluru and an MICA alumnus, he excels in crafting GTM playbooks and marketing campaigns tailored for D2C brands.
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Table of Contents
The Indian eCommerce industry is growing at a rapid pace. So much so that India is touted to become the world’s third largest eCommerce market in the next half a decade. While the numbers are quite impressive, there are many underlying challenges that most emerging brands are facing. To give you an example, many emerging eCommerce brands who’re registering a decent number of transactions per day, are failing to offer one of the most basic services to their customers – a proper channel of communication post order placement. GoKwik, via its intuitive Smart COD Suite offers best-in-class services to reduce RTO post order placement, safeguarding business huge losses.
According to multiple surveys done by Navar,
- 80% of customers feel that consistent post-purchase communication is the basic fundamental need that brands are failing to offer
- Poor order delivery communication is becoming the primary reason behind 74.4% of 1-star customers reviews
- Nearly 50% of consumers feel buyer’s remorse after a purchase due to lack of post-purchase communication.
And, in a country like India where customer curiosity is very high, brands need to understand that communication is the key to customer satisfaction, retention, and repeat orders.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through some tips and tricks that you, as an eCommerce brand, can use to,
- Effectively communicate with your customers
- Build a long-term, healthy relationship with shoppers
- Reduce return-to-origins (RTOs)
- Increase sales, and
- Build a steady revenue stream
1. Stay On Your Customer's Mind
There’s so much noise in the Indian online market today. Every day a new eCommerce brand spurs selling the hottest products, bringing in new trends, and starting a wave of customer retention war. Surviving amid such cut throat competition is tough.
The best way to stay on top of a customer’s mind is by constant communicating with them, especially after they’ve made a purchase from your platform.
The more you keep in touch – inform them about their order status, upcoming/on-going offers, discounts, etc. – the more likely they are to stick to your brand and even convert into a loyal customer.
2. Reduce A Buyer’s Remorse
In a layman’s language, buyer’s remorse is a feeling of regret that a buyer feels after making a purchase.
This typically happens when,
- They’re not informed about the status of their order at regular intervals
- They can’t find the right means to contact the brand to answers to their purchase-related queries
- They’re uncertain about the delivery of the order due to lack of brand trust
This eventually leads to order cancellations and hence, makes for one of the primary reasons behind high return-to-origins (RTOs) as well.
Ideally, the return-to-origin (RTO) scenario occurs when a shopper cancels their order after the it has been shipped by the seller due to numerous reasons. Read our blog What Is Return To Origin (RTO) In eCommerce? All You Need To Know to understand the concept in depth.
Communicating with customers at regular intervals post order placement helps,
- Reduce the remorse feeling
- Encourage repeat orders
- Word-of-mouth marketing
- Increase their level of excitement towards the upcoming delivery
- Maintain a high retention rate
3. Build A Relationship
Lastly, keeping your customers informed via an active channel of communication post-purchase also helps build a strong seller-buyer relationship. The better after-sales services you offer, the larger your base of loyal customers, and hence, the more shall be the number of repeat orders.
Strategies To Create Seamless Post Order Placement Experience
As spoken by a wise man, ‘Effective customer support can help even a sinking business stay afloat.’
To ensure that your business doesn’t sink, create an omnichannel customer support channel. This will help guide them through their journey, solve all queries that arise throughout their purchase and post-purchase journey, and significantly reduce the chances of RTO.
1. Use Automation To Engage Customers
Customers today have a very short retention span. If they don’t get a quick response from your end, the chances of them cancelling their orders increase exponentially. So, use new-age automation techniques to keep them calm, engaged, and reduce even the slightest of chances of RTO resulting from order cancellations.
According to statistics, 81% of the customers find it helpful when a chat window appears to proactively help them with their concerns.
Address their common concerns via automated, yet personalised messages. You can use bots to answer generic queries. Meanwhile, customer reps can take over to address larger issues. Some common concerns include,
- Where is my order?
- How do I return/replace an item?
- How can I change the delivery address?
- How can I reschedule my delivery?
- Is there an additional shipping cost attached?
By automating the query resolving process, you can monitor inbound questions, build automated answers for them as well and further reduce a customer’s anxiety. However, mould your answers in a way that they sound less robotic and more personalised.
2. Send Notifications At Regular Intervals To Reduce The Chances Of RTOs
Most RTOs happen when customers are not sent order notifications at regular intervals. No one likes to keep waiting (or shoot arrows in the dark) to know where their order is.
If you’re unable to provide them with the delivery details via your website, use communication channels like WhatsApp, SMS, email to help them track their shipment.
This helps to keep them calm and wait for their order eagerly. In fact, with such useful and regular notifications, customers can plan accordingly and make sure that they’re available to receive their orders at the delivery address.
Timely notifications also significantly reduce the chances of RTOs and hence, the revenue loss.
GoKwik has partnered with many leading communication brands like LimeChat, GupShup, and Tellephant to help its partner merchants offer effective channels of communication to customers via WhatsApp.
Each of these platforms enable seamless communication and help in reducing a customer’s anxiety and worry at every leg.
3. Use Smart Methods To Convert COD Orders Into Prepaid Ones
As a known fact, nearly 60-80% of the Indian buyers still place cash-on-delivery (COD) orders as a preferred mode of payment. And, about 40% of them can result in RTOs. The best way to reduce the RTO percentage is by converting these COD orders into prepaid ones.
Here’s how!
A. Send Reinforcement Communication Using Social Proofing
Primarily three categories of shoppers shop on a website – low-risk shoppers, medium-risk shoppers, and high-risk shoppers.
Low-risk customers are the ones who show high intent to accept orders at the time of delivery, show good online behaviour and in case of repeat purchases, are likely to become brand loyalists. Meanwhile, high risk shoppers are the ones with a history of high order cancellations causing maximum RTOs.
GoKwik provides you with an effective feature – The Intuitive Assurer. Powered by smart and intuitive algorithms, the feature flags high-risk shoppers and their orders and helps you send a series of reinforcement messages at regular intervals to ensure successful deliveries.
These messages could include,
- Sending item warranty details
- Tips to care for your product
- Order status (from order placement, to shipment, and out for delivery)
Our internal statistics show that such communication helps reduce the risk of RTO by as high as 10%.
B. Send Re-confirmation Messages To High-risk Customers
You can also use GoKwik’s Order Reconfirmer feature to double confirm a COD order with a shopper via WhatsApp before shipping their products.
With this feature, GoKwik helps you send COD reconfirmation messages only to the identified high-risk users with a high propensity to return/cancel a COD orders on or before the delivery is attempted. Such messages give these shoppers an opportunity to rethink their order and swiftly cancel it directly on WhatsApp without any extra effort.
With this simple feature, you can reduce RTO by as high as 20%, and save reverse logistics, product damage, and other added costs.
C. Give An Option to Convert COD into Prepaid Orders
With advanced features like GoKwik’s Headless Checkout, you can also prompt high-risk users to convert their COD orders into prepaid ones via WhatsApp at various stages even after order placement.
Here’s an example for your reference.
Such messages not only help convert COD orders into prepaid ones and reduce the risk of RTOs which are common amidst high-risk shoppers but also ensure that customer experience remains intact.
Meanwhile, you can send an altogether different set of messages to low-risk and medium-risk shoppers to ensure an excellent customer experience throughout their buying journey.
To Conclude,
Come 2022 and most eCommerce companies are still focusing their energies on increasing website traffic and conversions. However, they’re ensuring seamless post order placement communication is something that’s taking a backset. Well, this is where maximum churn and RTOs happens.
GoKwik offers smart post-purchase communication tools that can you, as an eCommerce brand to stop the leakage and ensure high profitability and a loyal customer base.
AUTHOR
Suhag Vamja
Head of Product Marketing @ GoKwik
