Which questions should you ask in a post-purchase survey?

Contentsquare’s post-purchase survey template recommends asking 3 simple questions designed to shed light on your customers’ thought process at the moment of purchase. They are: How satisfied are you with your purchase today? On a scale of 1–5. This will give you a numerical figure on the quality of the buying experience, which you can monitor over time. It’s a low-commitment question that gets your foot in the door and gives you the opportunity to ask more questions. What's the reason for your score? A long-text answer. A follow-up question based on your customers’ response to question 1. This is where you get qualitative responses that show you how to improve your customers’ buying experience. What made you buy from us today? A long-text answer. The responses here might be less directly related to the experience of your ecommerce site (e.g. “The page loaded quickly and was easy to navigate”—if the UX is smooth, no one will notice!) and more along the lines of subjective product benefits. It’s useful to have your customers’ perspective on product benefits when planning product and marketing initiatives.

Where should I place a post-purchase survey?

Post-purchase surveys should catch users the very moment they’ve made a purchase. That’s because most people don’t dwell on the experience of buying something online and might not remember the details if you ask them about it even a few hours down the line. Ideally, your post-purchase survey should appear on your purchase confirmation page within seconds of a payment being made.

Should I offer users an incentive for completing my post-purchase survey?

A post-purchase survey should be short and easy to answer, so there’s no need to offer a prize or incentive to respondents. In our experience, many ecommerce customers are willing to be helpful and will just reply. You also don’t need every customer to respond to get value out of the survey: even a small percentage of answers is enough to uncover things you may not have been aware of.

How to Set Up an Ecommerce Post-Purchase Survey in 5 Steps

Implementing an on-site survey right after your customers make a purchase is an easy, non-intrusive way to learn what you need to do to improve the buying experience and overcome potential objections.

We put together this quick guide to help you create a simple post-purchase survey in just a few minutes. We’ll go over exactly how, where, and when to set it up.

Set up your post-purchase survey today

Get a free Contentsquare trial, set up your post-purchase survey, and boost your ecommerce sales.

How to set up a post-purchase survey in 5 steps

There are plenty of tools out there that can help you do this, but we’ll be showing you how to do it through Contentsquare (that’s us 👋), which integrates with most major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify. To get started, sign up for a free Contentsquare account. You can create up to 3 surveys per month before you need to move to a paid plan.

Step 1: create a new survey

Head to the sidebar menu of your Contentsquare account, click on ‘Voice of Customer’, and then on ‘Surveys’.

Find this menu on the left of your screen

We’ll be using the post-purchase survey template. To find it, scroll down to ‘Browse templates’, use the search bar to find the relevant one, click ‘Use this template,’ and give your survey a name.

The template gallery gives you 40+ starting points for effective customer surveys

Step 2: customize your survey’s appearance

Select your survey's embed style to determine how it will appear on your site. The default option is a pop-over, which appears as an unobtrusive tab at the bottom right corner of a page.

You can see a preview of what your survey would look like using each embed style—choose whichever one fits best with your site’s user experience (UX).

There are 6 different embed options, so you’ll always find one to match your brand’s look

Then, set the language, position, background, and colors of the survey. You can also upload your logo if you choose.

Match your Contentsquare survey to your brand colors

Step 3: edit your survey questions

Contentsquare’s template includes 3 simple questions designed to provide insight into the purchase process.

How satisfied are you with your purchase today? (On a scale of 1–5)
What's the reason for your score? (A long-text answer)
What made you buy from us today? (A long-text answer)

Long-text answers allow users to leave multi-line, scrollable written responses

💡 Pro tip: if our default survey template questions aren’t quite what you need, use AI to write custom ones instead.

Contentsquare’s AI survey generator creates effective, unbiased questions based on your goals in seconds.

Simply enter the goals of your survey, and Contentsquare’s AI survey tool will generate effective questions for it

If you’d like to customize your survey questions further, you can:

Change the rating score labels: the 1–5 scores are called ‘Not satisfied at all’ – ‘Very satisfied’ by default, but you can swap these out for your own descriptors
Edit the question text
Add an image or gif
Add Logic so that users see a different question based on their initial answers. For example, if someone answers that they are ‘Not satisfied at all’ with their purchase, you might like to show a question inviting them to leave their email address for a 1:1 interview.
Delete questions by clicking the trash icon
Add questions, either AI-generated ones, or ones you’ve written yourself

Lastly, edit the thank you note that appears at the end of your survey to reflect your brand voice.

Step 4: choose your targeting settings

Now, it’s time to select who will see your survey and when. Select whether to show your survey on ‘Specific pages or events’ and set the survey to appear on your post-purchase thank-you screen. Use the user attributes feature to choose which user demographics will see this survey.

This is particularly helpful if you’d like to run a post-purchase survey on a specific customer segment: for example, customers in a single geographical region, or those who bought your product via mobile.

Choose who your survey should appear to

Next, choose how quickly this survey should appear after the page loads (we recommend immediately) and how often users should see it—should customers see this survey every time they purchase a product or just once in their customer life cycle?

Edit the timing and frequency settings to your specifications

💡 Pro tip: while we’re on the technical side of things, Contentsquarwe also lets you match survey responses to session replays. This allows you to watch the experience a user had with your site, leading up to answering your survey—which is useful for when customers report issues with the purchasing process.

To access this feature, toggle the consent message that asks survey takers to agree to this use of their data. It will read like this:

You can choose whether or not to map survey responses to other Contentsquare data points

Step 5: set up your process for receiving responses

Finally, it’s time to choose how you’d like to get your survey responses. You can keep them in the Contentsquare platform, or have them sent to collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, or email.

Alternatively, use Webhooks or Zapier to send them to any number of other data collection and storage tools.

Get your survey responses sent somewhere you’ll read them

On the final screen, you’ll see a recap of all the settings you’ve chosen. If everything looks good, set the survey status to ‘Active’—and you’re off!

💡 Pro tip: setting up your survey is only half the job. The other half is turning your responses into actionable insights.

If you need help analyzing your customers’ responses once they come in, try Contentsquare’s AI survey tools. They can:

Automatically tag your survey responses to reveal which key themes appear and how often
Create a word cloud of open-text answers, so you can visualize how often the same words appear across different responses
Generate a report that summarizes the key themes, pulls out interesting quotes, and mentions some next steps you might like to take
Run a sentiment analysis of your answers, to show whether the overall tone is positive, neutral, or negative

The sentiment analysis tool gives you a quantitative perspective on your qualitative survey data, revealing what % of your survey responses were positive

Increase conversions with a post-purchase survey

If you don’t already have a post-purchase survey, stop what you’re doing and set one up right now. After all, it only takes 5 minutes!

Getting answers in the moment and as close to the purchase experience as possible makes this type of survey more effective than a traditional, after-the-fact email survey (plus, it won’t get buried in your customers’ inbox).

Most importantly, the insights you gain are some of the quickest wins you get when it comes to increasing your sales and conversions.

Set up your post-purchase survey today

Get a free Contentsquare trial, set up your post-purchase survey, and boost your ecommerce sales.

FAQs about post-purchase surveys

Contentsquare’s post-purchase survey template recommends asking 3 simple questions designed to shed light on your customers’ thought process at the moment of purchase. They are:
- How satisfied are you with your purchase today? On a scale of 1–5. This will give you a numerical figure on the quality of the buying experience, which you can monitor over time. It’s a low-commitment question that gets your foot in the door and gives you the opportunity to ask more questions.
- What's the reason for your score? A long-text answer. A follow-up question based on your customers’ response to question 1. This is where you get qualitative responses that show you how to improve your customers’ buying experience.
- What made you buy from us today? A long-text answer. The responses here might be less directly related to the experience of your ecommerce site (e.g. “The page loaded quickly and was easy to navigate”—if the UX is smooth, no one will notice!) and more along the lines of subjective product benefits. It’s useful to have your customers’ perspective on product benefits when planning product and marketing initiatives.

How to set up an ecommerce post-purchase survey in 5 steps

Set up your post-purchase survey today