Churn Challenges? Solve Them with Pre-Orders

Crunching the numbers, here’s what we found: Customers love a pre-order.

Our data shows that 18% of pre-order customers go on to place another within three months. However, there’s a caveat. Our data is based on customers of Purple Dot merchants. We create a clear customer experience that helps brands build trust and loyalty.

Many customers are wary of pre-orders because of bad experiences they’ve had in the past. In many cases, it only takes one. A single bad experience will cause 50% of customers to abandon a brand.

Bad pre-order experiences hurt customer confidence, decreasing conversions and increasing churn. Meanwhile, customers who are satisfied with their pre-orders keep coming back. Read on to learn why that is and how to make it happen.

Pre-orders gone wrong (and how Purple Dot makes it right)‍

It starts out innocently enough. Something breaks down on the supply chain, a common occurrence. A McKinsey survey found that 90% of companies have experienced supply chain challenges over the past year. Still, that’s when things start to unravel.

If there’s a delay, FTC regulations require you to communicate that ASAP. Without solid pre-order operations, this means your team has to manually pull lists of pre-order customers. This may take several days.

Not getting updates, customers start to worry their money disappeared into the ether. Your customer service department is suddenly inundated with calls to the effect of, “Where is my pre-order?!” Other customers give you bad customer satisfaction scores and share their negative experiences on social media.  

Before you know it, one small delay has snowballed into an avalanche of dissatisfied (and likely churned) customers.

Overall, this isn’t the experience of Purple Dot brands. The average CSAT score for eCommerce retailers selling in-stock items is 78%. For our merchants, the average is 84.8%.

That’s no coincidence. We help brands maintain strong CSAT scores by constantly monitoring them and taking action to push them higher.

Our communications help. When customers pay for something that’s not in stock, they’re placing trust in your brand. Our pre-commerce platform makes it easy to honor that trust, with automated messages around order and shipping confirmations, as well as status updates in the event of something like a delay.

The strong customer experience speaks for itself. Not only do Purple Dot merchants see a huge percentage of repeat business, they also see improved conversion rates.For customers without a pre-order in their cart, we see an average conversion rate of 22%. However, that goes up to 26.1% for customers that did have a pre-order. That’s a 18.6% increase.

Signaling confidence with short shipping windows

‍One misconception about pre-orders is that people don’t want to wait for them. Hasn’t Amazon trained us all to expect our online purchases to arrive yesterday?

Customers are willing to wait, it turns out.

The overwhelming majority of our brands’ pre-orders have a wait time between 12 and 41 days. That’s quite a range! Within that nearly month-long window, we’ve found no correlation between the length of wait time and a brand’s page-to-buy conversion.

Where we did find a correlation? Brands’ page-to-buy conversion was much more impacted by the estimated shipping window. When that window was between one and five days, we saw an average conversion rate close to 9%. That drops by about half for shipping windows longer than 10 days.

The long shipping window sends a message that you don’t even know when you’ll ship a customer’s pre-order. That breeds doubt and uncertainty. If someone is already wary of pre-orders, that’s not likely to help put them at ease.

Like clear communications, a tighter shipping window signals confidence. When in doubt, push the shipping dates out and make the window tighter. That says your pre-order operations are buttoned-up, which broadcasts trust. When customers feel like they can trust you, they’re far more likely to shop with your brand.

‍Drive loyalty with pre-orders

‍Loyal shoppers are the holy grail for any brand. On average, repeat customers order (and spend) far more than new ones.

Many brands don’t realize that when operations are smooth, pre-orders build loyalty. Since implementing Purple Dot, one home goods brand decreased order status tickets by a whopping 37%. Clear communications are just one way to drive loyalty.

The pre-order experience gives brands the opportunity to surprise and delight customers. During the first half of 2025, we saw brands ship 36% of orders early. Many Purple Dot merchants offer exclusive drops and early access pre-orders specifically for their VIP customers, making those “P” feel even more “VI.” 

Looking to level up your loyalty with pre-orders? We’d love to help. Get in touch at hello@getpurpledot.com.