Most UK fashion retailers stop marketing after checkout

Most of the top fashion retailers in the United Kingdom fail to offer a post-checkout experience to its customers. For example, they don’t send tailored delivery messages and thus miss out on a upsell opportunity.

For most top online fashion retailers in the United Kingdom, customer centricity ends almost immediately after the customer completed the purchase. After checkout, they are left on their own to navigate the shipping and returns process for themselves, a new study by ParcelLab shows.

The study shows that 99 percent of the top 100 fashion retailers in the UK fail to provide their customers with a personalized post-checkout experience. ParcelLab analyzed the checkout, shipping and returns of these retailers and found out that 93 ecommerce companies end communication with the customer immediately after checkout.

‘Retailers should upsell products after checkout’

“Retailers should be actively engaging with customers at this point through personalized, branded post-checkout communications”, Katharine Biggs from ParcelLab explains. “This is a prime stage in the customer journey to upsell products in delivery communications and currently only one retailer is doing this.”

According to the study, 74 percent of fashion retailer let their logistics carrier host parcel tracking, which means they are missing out on the opportunity to capture an engage audience. Because, tracking mails have an opening rate of 60 percent. If online retailers would host parcel tracking themselves, they could use it us for upselling products.

Most customers directed to courier’s track & trace page

Now, 60 percent of customers are directed to the track & trace page of the courier, while only one in four retailers direct customers to a branded track & trace page, one that’s rarely hosted in the retailer’s domain.

Only 12 percent offer free shipping

Other important findings from the study include the fact that only 12 fashion retailers offer free shipping, while 65 only offer free shipping when a minimum order value has been reached. And only 16 percent of the analyzed retailers offer a timeslot for delivery, while 31 percent give an exact delivery date. The most retailers (57 percent) give a predicated date range, but 14 of them give no prediction at all.

Most popular return method happens in-store

When it comes to returning fashion items, there’s a difference noticeable in service mentality, ParcelLab says. The most popular option is to return items in-store, which is offered by 64 percent of fashion retailers. This method is followed by Royal Mail returns, of which 51 percent include a prepaid label in the box. And 11 percent expect that customers arrange the return themselves.