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Buyer’s remorse
If there’s a feeling all shoppers feel at one point, it is regret.
You’ve felt it at least once… if you’re lucky. We felt it at least five times this month.
It doesn’t only happen with big investments like cars, houses… or stocks.
It can happen when you buy a higher-end desktop monitor that didn’t quite fit your set up. Or a fancy bag that looked way better online.
It’s called buyer’s remorse. Psychologists define it as the feeling of regret or anxiety that follows a purchase decision and conflicts with our pre-purchase excitement.
And it’s a serious issue. So serious that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) applied a “Cooling Off Rule,” allowing customers to cancel buying contracts three days after they bought something.
For merchants and marketers, buyer’s remorse manifests in many revenue-harmful ways:
- It can increase returns, which can be quite costly if you’re selling physical goods.
- It can damage your brand if the purchasing experience gets tied to negative emotions.
- It can impact loyalty, which can affect your retention and customer lifetime value.
Since buyer’s remorse is a negative emotion, the goal isn’t to leverage it. You have to eliminate it from the purchase experience.
Let’s see how you can do it.
Three ways to prevent buyer’s remorse in marketing
1) Go all in to reduce risk
The best approach to reducing buyer’s remorse is eliminating it before it even happens.
You can do this in multiple ways:
- A hassle-free return policy that makes buyers feel like they have an escape hatch if needed.
- If you’re selling SaaS or other digital products, provide customers a trial to “feel” the product before buying.
- Offer money-back guarantees with transparent terms.
- Post-purchase support through multiple channels where you can provide answers and assistance.
We try to mitigate this feeling when selling Stacked Marketer Pro, our premium subscription:
The little fee we request is usually to prevent bots and invite only real marketers to test it out—and give them just enough time to see whether the product fits.
If you give shoppers a safety net—a simple way to “undo” their decision—the anxiety that fuels remorse may diminish.
But not all is rosy: As we mentioned, for physical goods the cost of returns can outweigh the upsides.
So you should still provide a product or a service that your customers are likely to be happy with.
2) Sprinkle in an extra benefit or gift for the “wow” factor
What you don’t want your customers to say: Did I make a mistake?
What you want instead: Wow, I’ve made a great choice!
That’s one of the core principles of The Delight Effect—which sellers often use to make shoppers view their brand more favorably.
If a purchase feels purely transactional, regret can creep in. But when there’s an unexpected benefit, it can reframe the emotional experience completely.
Here’s how you can do it:
Immediately highlight the benefits of the product or service. Send post-purchase emails or add notes that affirm your customers’ choices.
Zappos customers used to receive a flier explaining how the shoes prevent common runner’s injuries. Suddenly buying them felt more like a smart decision and less like an impulse buy.
Add unexpected gifts or perks. Sephora often rewards loyal customers with free samples in their packages, which replace that post-purchase regret with more excitement.
One such gesture made it to Reddit, for example:
3) React again after 48 or 72 hours
In 2000, two researchers found that buyer’s remorse comes from our tendency to imagine alternative outcomes.
They also found that 80% of major purchase decisions trigger “post-purchase anxiety.”
The interesting part: They revealed that this feeling peaks around 48–72 hours after buying.
If you stay silent, you give buyers time to doubt. But if you reach out at the right time, you can reshape their perception of the purchase.
Here’s an interesting post-purchase email from a beauty product that does this:
With this email, the brand:
- Reassures the buyer, framing the purchase as a smart, ethical choice.
- Reinforces product value, highlighting skincare benefits, cruelty-free certification, and sustainability.
- Encourages engagement by providing a “Read More” button and social links to keep the brand top-of-mind.
What you can do: Send a post-purchase email 48–72 hours after purchase. It may help your customers feel better about what they bought and scatter negative thoughts.
By the way, do you feel a little wiser now? You should. Simply reading this newsletter makes you a smarter, more capable marketer.
See what we did there? No “Reader’s Remorse.” At least, we hope not.
AI this, AI that… Here’s how it truly affects you in your job and your daily life
Raise your hand if most AI news makes you more confused than informed. We thought so.
We had the same problem but we now read The Deep View. This free newsletter focuses on AI developments that could actually impact your work and decisions.
Second-day news, deep dives, and other exclusive content. All packaged into a fun, 5-minute read to help you understand “Why does this matter to me?”
Even readers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a16z start their day with these insights.
CONTENT MARKETING: Content marketing budgets are rising. But is that money well spent? What can you expect from your content in the following months? This report tries to answer it with a little help from data. Worth a read.
GOOGLE: Ads are getting chatty. Performance Max is getting a message engagement option, similar to one that’s already available in Search campaigns—which lets users chat with you directly from your ads. This should make users easier to reach out to you when ready.
GROWTH MARKETING: If success is measured by user-generated content, McDonald’s, Wingstop, and Starbucks are winning. Turns out the brands that are good at generating buzz are the ones that Gen Z drifts towards… and spends their money on. Something to think about.
AI MARKETING: OpenAI is developing a new AI model focused on creative writing. Most AI models are good at data—when they’re not hallucinating—so it’ll be interesting to see how this one handles fiction. No release date yet, but it could be a useful tool for generating creative assets.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Delight Effect.
The “Regretful” Crew
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