“A lot of the people that work at these brands have never seen this done really well… Where no one’s seen the gold standard, it’s like: who picks this up?”
This observation from Angus Knights, VP of Product at parcelLab, cuts to the heart of why so many retailers stay stuck with post-purchase vendors they openly complain about. The barrier goes way beyond technical complexity or budget constraints: most eCommerce teams have simply never experienced what great post-purchase can look like.
The invisible problem nobody owns
Post-purchase sits in a strange category of business problems. As soon as your warehouse management system fails? Products stop shipping. If your payment gateway breaks? Orders can’t be processed. The pain is immediate, visible, and impossible to ignore.
Post-purchase is different. Packages still arrive, and emails still go out. On the surface, everything appears to function. But beneath that surface, the cracks run deep, and almost nobody can see them. Angus explains:
“The thing about post-purchase experience is that the benefits are different. It’s not to keep the lights on technology. But actually, when you really double click into “how to build profitable eCommerce businesses”, experience is essential. You cannot survive long-term without it. But I think the pain is a different pain. It’s like a chronic kind of slightly undiagnosed pain that sits in the background.”
This chronic pain manifests in ways that rarely trigger alarm bells. Customers who don’t return, preventable support tickets, and revenue attribution that’s broken without anyone realizing it. The costs accumulate invisibly, quarter after quarter, while teams focus on brighter fires.
Making matters worse, post-purchase spans nearly every department in an organization. Logistics handles carrier relationships. eCommerce owns the website. Marketing manages customer communications, customer service deals with the fallout, and CX teams measure satisfaction. But who actually owns the end-to-end experience?
“It’s such a cross-functional project across operations, logistics, and eCommerce. It touches on marketing, it touches on customer experience, and it impacts customer service. There are so many different departments across this whole space that often the ownership is split.”
Back to the question: “Who picks this up?” The answer, too often, is: nobody does.
When first implementations disappoint
Most retailers considering a vendor switch aren’t starting from zero. They’ve been through this before. Years ago, they invested in a post-purchase solution with high hopes for better tracking, proactive communications, reduced support volume, and maybe even incremental revenue.
The implementation delivered some of those benefits. Metrics improved. But the transformation everyone envisioned? It probably never quite materialized. Projects that were supposed to take two months stretched to five or six. Features that sounded simple proved surprisingly difficult to execute. And somewhere along the way, enthusiasm gave way to resignation.
This creates a particular kind of organizational trauma. Teams begin to question whether the problem was their vendor, their own execution, or whether post-purchase simply isn’t as impactful as everyone claims. That uncertainty becomes its own barrier: why risk another painful implementation if the payoff might be equally disappointing?
The expert perspective
Angus Knights brings a unique vantage point to these questions. Before leading product strategy at parcelLab, he ran the Solutions Consulting team. The technical pre-sales group that works directly with retailers who are evaluating vendor switches. He’s sat across the table from hundreds of eCommerce leaders wrestling with this exact decision.
All that experience revealed a pattern. The retailers who stayed stuck weren’t lacking capability or resources; they were lacking visibility into what was actually possible. Vendor promises weren’t helping because every vendor promises everything.
The 95/5 execution gap
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about vendor evaluation: on paper, every post-purchase platform offers essentially the same features. Need embedded tracking pages on your domain? They can do it. Want proactive delay notifications? No problem. Looking for carrier integration with your specific 3PL setup? Absolutely. Angus confirms:
“On a theoretical level, almost every vendor has almost all capabilities. If you really just break it down to: “can we put a tick in the box for ‘did we do this once somewhere?’” The answer is usually yes. Almost everyone has done something once somewhere. But that doesn’t mean that the people […] actually know how to do this.”
This is the checkbox problem. Vendors staff RFPs with features they’ve technically implemented at least once, somewhere, for some customer. That single successful implementation becomes a “yes” on the capability list regardless of whether the team assigned to your project has ever done it before, or whether they can do it consistently at scale.
In short, execution frequency beats capability. Angus illustrates this with tracking pages:
“In 95% of cases, for hundreds of customers that we have, our pages are embedded. In 95% of cases for other vendors, the pages are not embedded. We both have all the same capabilities, but 95% of the time we’re behaving differently.”
Same features on the spec sheet. Radically different outcomes in practice. This 95/5 execution gap explains why two retailers can choose vendors with identical capability lists and end up with completely different results.
This translates directly into the due diligence question that actually matters: Instead of “Can you do this?” ask: “What percentage of your customers are you actually doing this for?”
The three P’s of vendor evaluation
Breaking through the capability theater requires a different evaluation framework. One that looks beyond feature lists to the factors that actually predict success. Angus describes this as the Three P’s: Purpose, People, and Platform.
Purpose comes first, before any vendor conversation begins. What are you actually trying to achieve? The answer shapes everything that follows.
Some retailers are revenue-first. They see post-purchase as a channel for driving repeat purchases, and they want segmentation capabilities, personalized product recommendations, and different communication flows for different customer cohorts. Others are experience-first. They’re focused on reducing friction, proactively addressing delivery issues, and turning support contacts into opportunities for delight.
Neither approach is wrong. But a vendor optimized for one may underdeliver on the other. Starting with purpose prevents the common mistake of evaluating platforms based on features you’ll never prioritize.
People determine whether capabilities become reality. The humans behind the vendor – their expertise, their availability, their understanding of your specific business goals – matter more than any feature on a roadmap.
Reference calls should give you a good idea of the team you’re working with. Be sure to ask: “How does the collaboration actually work? Who do you have access to when problems arise? Do they understand what you’re trying to accomplish, or are they just trying to close tickets?”
Watch for warning signs:
Project teams focused solely on getting to launch rather than driving business outcomes.
Expertise that exists somewhere in the vendor organization but isn’t available to you.
Slow response times that suggest you’re not a priority.
Platform is not just a question of features, but of accessibility. Can your team actually use the capabilities on offer, or do they require weeks of vendor involvement for every change?
This distinction matters enormously for long-term value. Angus observes:
“If setting up an email communication is going to take you five weeks, you just don’t bother because it’s not on fire. It’s just a friction that you’d like to address, and it’s hard to do. And if you are working on a solution where it’s very easy, like a couple of hours to test a solution, then your likelihood of taking that step is just so much higher.”
Self-service capability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the key to driving improvements continuously over time.
Strategic principles for eCommerce and CX leaders
Beyond the Three P’s framework, several principles separate the retailers who successfully navigate vendor evaluation from those who stay stuck.
→ Order from the vendor’s customers. Every vendor will show you their lighthouse references. The handful of implementations they’re proudest of. These prove that their capabilities exist somewhere. They tell you nothing about consistency.
Instead, place actual orders from retailers using the vendors you’re evaluating. Experience their tracking pages, their email communications, and their returns process. Do this across multiple brands, not just one. The patterns that emerge will reveal far more than any demo or reference call.
→ Use reference calls strategically. When you do get on calls with existing customers, skip the softball questions. Ask which metrics mattered most during their switch. Ask how the collaboration actually works day-to-day. Ask what surprised them, positively or negatively. Ask what they’d do differently.
→ Solve the ownership problem internally. The most successful post-purchase implementations share a common organizational pattern: cross-functional ownership, typically through product management.
When post-purchase sits with logistics, the focus narrows to carrier performance. When it sits with marketing, the focus narrows to email metrics. When it sits with customer service, the focus narrows to ticket deflection. Only when a cross-functional owner can optimize across all these dimensions does post-purchase reach its full potential.
If your organization doesn’t have this ownership model today, no vendor switch will solve the underlying problem. The organizational design has to come first.
→ Establish benchmarks before you switch. The ability to demonstrate clear before-and-after improvement changes everything about internal momentum. It turns skeptics into advocates and justifies continued investment. In the long run, you’ll need the organizational permission to push further.
Identify your key metrics now – WISMO contact rates, repeat purchase attribution, delivery exception handling, whatever matters most to your purpose – and establish clean baselines before any migration begins. Interested in how the story continues? Check Angus’ 3 Phase Playbook for successful vendor migration.
The cost of waiting
The gap between “good enough” and “best in class” post-purchase experience is widening. Leading retailers are pushing into territory that simply doesn’t exist in legacy setups: AI-powered WISMO agents that handle customer inquiries conversationally, predictive interventions that resolve delivery issues before customers even notice, and hyper-personalized communication flows that drive measurably higher lifetime value.
These capabilities are fundamentally new, and they’re creating competitive separation that grows more significant every quarter.
Meanwhile, contract cycles are creating natural evaluation moments. Many retailers implemented their current post-purchase solutions 3 to 5 years ago, during the eCommerce boom. Those contracts are coming up for renewal. The best moment to evaluate alternatives is now: with clear eyes about what’s actually possible.
The chronic pain of suboptimal post-purchase won’t announce itself. It won’t trigger urgent action the way a warehouse failure would. It will simply continue accumulating in customers who don’t return, support costs that could have been avoided, and revenue attribution that remains invisible.
Breaking free starts with recognizing what you might be missing. Shop the competition. Ask the hard questions. Solve the ownership problem. And above all: resist the assumption that what you have is good enough, simply because you’ve never seen better.
Your questions, answered
Post-purchase problems are more like a chronic pain rather than an acute crisis. They don’t demand immediate action the way operational failures do. Look out for quiet symptoms like customers who don’t return, preventable support tickets, and broken revenue attribution.
Don’t ask “Can you do this?” Ask “What percentage of your customers are you actually doing this for?” The execution frequency, not theoretical capability, is what determines your likely outcome.
The most successful implementations are led cross-functionally by product management rather than siloed in individual departments. Logistics, CRM, and customer service each see only partial pictures – true optimization requires end-to-end ownership that spans all touchpoints.
Retailers typically see around 40% better results after switching vendors, driven by factors like more reliable email delivery, embedded rather than hosted tracking pages, and improved carrier data quality.
Watch out for the Three P’s: Purpose (What business outcome are you trying to achieve?), People (Who will implement and support the solution, and how do they work?), and Platform (What does the technology actually enable your team to do independently?). This framework helps evaluate beyond feature lists to factors that predict real-world success in post purchase.
