In the world of DTC, post-purchase experiences can make or break a customer’s perception of a brand. That’s where Onward comes in. Founded by Josh Payne, Onward helps retailers turn routine order protection into a premium experience that boosts repeat purchases, enhances satisfaction, and actually saves brands money. Instead of charging merchants for another SaaS tool, Onward makes it possible to offer valuable perks, like free returns, cashback credits, and 90-day guarantees; without added operational complexity.We sat down with Josh to unpack how he’s redefining the post-purchase moment and why consolidation, responsiveness, and trust are shaping the next era of customer experience.
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Onward is a true order upgrade service for your customers (shipping protection, CashBack, Satisfaction Guarantees and Free Returns). Our post-purchase platform helps merchants become more profitable without sacrificing their customer experience and includes a SaaS-free returns app, claims management and order editing software.
With Onward, retailers can provide a premium customer experience (e.g.- Shipping Protection, Free Returns, 90-day Quality Guarantee, CashBack Credit, Upgraded shipping + others) at no cost improving repeat purchase rates all while reducing fulfillment and CX operational expenses.
It’s a true order upgrade for your customers and results in higher adoption rates and financial impact for brands. You’ll also get access to an entire post-purchase platform, including returns and order editing apps that are completely SaaS-free.
When shipping protection started to become mainstream with merchants, but customers were not thrilled with the value they were receiving. Brands were simplifying post-purchase customer issues and also improving margins, but users weren’t as thrilled with the benefits they were receiving when adding shipping protection.
This is why Onward built something different - something that adds value to the customer experience regardless of whether not the customer has a shipping incident. It’s like an AMEX platinum card — the value you get in benefits & credits is much higher than the fee itself making the experience a great one for customers and merchant alike.
Many brands focus on just the issue related to shipping incidents (lost/stolen/damaged), but in reality, the post-purchase customer experience spans across order issues & adjustments, returns & exchanges, and most importantly — retention & repeat purchase. Onward is the only platform in the space that helps with all 3 of these areas.
I ran a nine-figure marketplace prior to founding Onward, so I experienced all the issues running a brand - especially the challenges around the dual goal of maintaining an extremely high bar for the customer experience while also improving profitability margins. It’s much easier said than done - but it’s why I knew we had to create Onward because it’s this very unique solution that enables brands to improve their customer response times and increase margins without sacrificing anything.
It’s not really a feature, but it’s our speed & responsiveness to merchant’s needs.
We’re a true order upgrade, not just shipping protection. Our big realization was that if nothing goes wrong during the delivery, what did the customer get out of ordering shipping protection? So we created benefits customers truly value, like CashBack credits, a 90-day quality guarantee and optional free returns. The huge benefit for merchants is that our service sees much higher adoption rates due to the extra benefits and we’re able to deliver much more financial impact for them as a result.
Consolidation. Merchants want to save costs on SaaS-related expenses and they want to simplify what it takes to manage their tech stack. Less providers is better than more providers. That’s why Onward has launched 2 new products in addition to Shipping Protection and Order Tracking: Returns & Exchanges and Order Editing. Both of these help merchants own the entire post-purchase flow in one place.
Partnerships are about trust. You have to be proactive about making adjustments throughout the lifecycle of a partnership between a software provider and the merchant. The merchant’s needs are constantly evolving and it’s important to setup milestones to ensure you’re understanding and responding to their needs BEFORE they happen.
Not much to be honest. Unlike most of our competitors, we built Onward completely bootstrapped which allowed us to build slowly over time without over hiring and then letting go of half the team. We’ve been methodical, consistent, and focused on creating incredible experiences for premium brands that want to modernize their stack. All that said, had I know we’d grow this fast - it would have been nice to invest a bit more resources early on to capitalize even further on that growth curve!
Never give up.
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