The product your ecommerce business sells is not the thing that determines whether customers return. The experience of buying it is.
This sounds obvious when it is stated plainly. It is not treated as obvious in the allocation of resource, attention and commercial priority inside the businesses I look at. The product team is funded. The acquisition team is funded. The experience between account creation and second purchase, the sequence of touchpoints that determines whether the customer who just bought from you for the first time ever buys from you again, is owned by nobody in particular and optimised by nobody at all.
That sequence is the most commercially leveraged part of the entire customer journey and it is structurally invisible in the way most ecommerce businesses are organised. Because it happens after the acquisition metric completed and before the retention metric is measured and in the gap between those two measurement moments a significant proportion of your customer lifetime value is either built or permanently lost.
You cannot acquire your way past a broken post-purchase architecture. The mathematics do not work.
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