How to Collect & Use Customer Feedback 

When you, as a Shopify merchant, notice a drop in sales, your immediate panic reaction might be to change the site's design, the product images to make them look more professional, or even the prices, rather than the customer feedback. A little later, you still see the same results, if not worse. Then you suddenly discover that the main problem was the confusion with your catalog, maybe product sizes or the shipping process. 

This is where we understand the importance of customer feedback. Running an e-commerce store is not easy, so it makes sense why many merchants would prefer the easy path of guessing what customers want. In the long run, it actually harms both the merchant and the customer. This is how customer feedback can change these assumptions into real insights to improve. 

To make this whole process a lot easier, we’ll break down what feedback you should collect, when to ask for it, and what decisions you can make based on it, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way.

Collecting Feedback During the Customer Journey

There are a few places where asking for customer feedback is simply useless cuz they are most likely not to even give you feedback. Many would be surprised at the number of cases when merchants ask for feedback when the product has not left the warehouse. One, the customer probably will not answer; two, if they do answer, that is also useless because they haven’t gotten to see the product yet. There are also cases when merchants ask why the customers didn't buy a product three weeks after they left their website. In that case, they won't even remember who you are. The best way to collect feedback is to do it through the customer journey. Here's what we mean. 

The Browsing Phase

You can add on-site surveys when a visitor is browsing your store; they're actively forming an opinion about your brand, your product selection, and your website's usability. When they leave without buying, you might want to know why before they disappear forever. These on-site surveys allow you to catch window shoppers and those who are hesitant and ask them for first impressions and opinions.

There are different surveys you can trigger based on specific user behavior. Maybe an exit intent when the mouse hovers over the close tab, or after they spend a good amount of time looking at a specific product category without adding anything to their cart. It's about timing, and it helps you discover why people are leaving without buying. To maximize your results, you need to keep the questions short, in this case open-ended, asking something like “Was there any information missing from this page?”

Exit Intent Survey Example

The Buying Phase

You can add a survey the minute someone completes an order. It's good timing for customer feedback because they just trusted you with their money, and their experience with your checkout process is fresh in their minds. It's the best time to evaluate your user experience and catch any checkout friction.

Usually, these types of surveys appear immediately on the thank-you or order confirmation page. If you want to send an email or check out feedback, that might be a missed opportunity because you want their opinion the minute they are on your website to maximize the chances of them giving attention to the survey. 

This is a post-purchase survey, and they usually use the NPS (Net Promoter Score) question type, which is based on a rating. You can use that to ask how smooth your checkout process felt and whether the customer experienced any technical bugs or confusing forms. You can focus your questions on the ease of transaction or any final hesitations. Keep it short and easy to answer with questions like “How would you rate your shopping experience today?”

Post-purchase Survey Example

Post-Delivery Phase

It's also just as productive, and if you're saying to ask for feedback after the package arrives, this is basically the phase when the customer turns into a user. This is where you can ask questions about product quality, fulfillment accuracy, and delivery speed. It answers whether the product lives up to the digital expectations given by your website images and descriptions.

You can send this survey via email or SMS 3 to 7 days after the tracking number marks the package as officially delivered. There are different questions you can ask at this stage because it covers a lot more topics than the other phases. You can ask, " Are you satisfied with your new items?”  or “Did your order arrive in good condition?” This is the stage where you can also use a structured rating scale followed by an open text box to give you both data and qualitative details to consider when making improvements. 

Post-Delivery Survey Example

Customer Feedback Examples: Common Problems and Practical Solutions

Collecting feedback is only 50% of the work done because you need to put that into action. That's where the true value of customer service is. The ultimate goal of any survey is to build an optimization. Obviously, the reason why customer responses exist is not that you want to collect data, but it's because you want to find solutions to specific problems which your own customers help you identify and maybe even suggest solutions for. There are common pieces of customer feedback and also practical solutions that you can use for them, and here's a breakdown of the most popular ones. 

High Shipping Costs 

When people abandon their carts before completing the purchase օne feedback that they might leave is that the shipping costs are too high. When they say this, it's because they're telling you that unexpected fees at checkout are ruining the flow of the purchase. There are a few things you can do to solve this. 

First, you can offer free shipping, such as “free shipping on orders over an X amount”. This helps you not because you offer free shipping and they know that it's going to be free, but also it makes the customer want to order more. Obviously, there are cases when you cannot offer free shipping, and for that, make sure you explain your shipping rates much earlier in the process. It would ideally be right on the product page so there are zero surprises at the checkout. You can also try flat rate shipping, which means that the final calculation and the cost at the end feel a lot more predictable. 

Sizing Problem

Sizing hesitation is one of the most common customer feedback problems in the online shopping. You wouldn't want a sizing problem to lead to high return rates and abandoned cards so here's how to fix it.

Upgrade your on-site resources, which means you need to improve your size guides to include exact physical measurements and clear visual measuring instructions. You can try building extra trust by encouraging customers to upload photos in your review section so that others can see how items look on real people with different body types or just in real life. And you can add clear fit recommendations on the products page, such as “runs small; we recommend ordering one size up,” etc. 

Too Many Choices

When you have a huge catalog or products that target similar problems, one issue that customers may run into is not being able to compare those products side by side. So customer feedback would be something along the lines of, “I couldn't compare the products,” Etc.

To guide shoppers, you can introduce interactive comparison tables directly on your collection pages to show the technical differences between your models. You can also improve your collections by adding product filters that let users quickly sort by specific material, features, or even price points. If your catalog is particularly huge, launching a simple product recommendation quiz can also act as a digital personal assistant that asks user if you quick questions and immediately directs them to the exact product they need.

Look for Patterns in Customer Feedback Instead of Individual Complaints

When you're reading through customer feedback in your survey, it is very easy to take everything very personally. The first mistake is exactly that. If a customer makes a comment about the website layout or doesn't like the product color, your immediate instinct would be to change it. One thing you have to keep in mind is that if the feedback lacks any critical thought or constructive criticism, for that matter, it's a personal preference that your customer has that turned into a complaint on their side.

One person does not tell the whole story. If you react to every single piece of individual criticism, taking it very close to your heart, you will find yourself trapped in a never-ending cycle of changing and revising your store design without making any real progress. 

This is fixable if you start looking for patterns. Any productive and effective feedback analysis is about similarity and repetition. If way too many customers all mention that they found your shipping information confusing or that your sizing chart runs small, you have found a systematic problem that is experienced by many people and not a single person.

As a merchant, you should prioritize recurring feedback that affects the majority of the audience rather than an isolated opinion. 

Conclusion

It might seem like a very complex and time-consuming process to improve your e-commerce store, but it truly doesn't have to be. In fact, major changes often introduce entirely new and different problems that you have to deal with. Instead, the most successful merchants try to commit to a simple and predictable monthly customer feedback process that builds a flow over time.

At the end of every month, dedicate a small block of time to review your latest customer feedback responses. Once you have looked past the one-off opinions that reflect personal preferences and opinions, start looking for patterns and the biggest recurring issues that your shoppers are experiencing.

Next, focus your efforts on making just one targeted Improvement to solve that specific problem. After you've completed turning the feedback into action, see if there are any changes. Over the following month, measure your sales cart abandonment or satisfaction metrics to see how the Improvement actually performs, and then you just repeat the cycle the next month.

These are small but very effective improvements that have far greater long-term impact than any website redesign could ever. And to make this process seem even less stressful, there are many tools out there like Apricot Surveys that help merchants collect feedback across the entire customer Journey that we mentioned. You don't have to look for places to improve your website yourself; your customers will do it for you. You just have to ask.