Why do products fail at the second purchase?

What decides the first purchase, and what decides the second?

The first purchase is decided by what the brand shows. The second is decided by what the product does at home.

Think about the last thing you bought online and never bought again. You probably never told the brand. You just didn’t reorder.

That first purchase was the brand’s work. The ad caught your eye, the pack looked right, the price felt fair, and you paid before you had used it once. The second purchase is the product’s work. By then you’ve used it, compared it with the one it was meant to replace, and maybe heard what someone else at home thought of it.

I put it in one line: first purchase is conviction. The second purchase is the truth.

When does the second purchase get decided?

For products people use every day, it gets decided once the novelty wears off, usually in the second week of use.

In week one, a new face wash sits at the front of the shelf and gets the benefit of the doubt. By week two it isn’t new any more, and it isn’t a habit yet. It has to earn its place next to the brand it was meant to replace. Week one tells you it works. Week two tells you whether anyone remembers it exists.

A habit takes far longer than a week to settle. In a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, volunteers each took up one simple daily behaviour: something they ate, drank or did for exercise. It took a median of 66 days before the behaviour felt automatic, and anywhere from 18 to 254 days depending on the person. These were health habits, not products, so I don’t read 66 days as a product timeline. What the study shows is that two weeks in, nothing is settled. The product is past its novelty and still far from being a habit, and that gap is where a lot of second purchases are lost.

Why does a product people liked still lose the second purchase?

Because liking a product and buying it again are two different decisions. Someone can like a product overall and still have one small problem with it, and that small problem is often why they don’t buy it again.

In a 2024 study in the journal Foods, 207 people in Spain used a new hot sauce at home. On every quality they were asked about, from spiciness to thickness, at least half said it was “just about right”. Still, 42 percent found it too thin.

The study didn’t follow what those people bought next, so I can’t tell you what the 42 percent did. But picture it in your own kitchen. Hardly anyone writes a review about a sauce being a bit thin. Nobody calls the brand. Next time, they just pick a different one.

The same goes for a hair oil that feels sticky in humid weather, or a dishwash liquid that needs one squeeze too many. Each problem is small, and each is enough to end the reorder. None of them shows up in a launch report.

Why don’t ratings and launch sales warn you?

Because launch sales measure the first purchase, and ratings come from the people who chose to write one, who are rarely a fair sample.

Launch sales tell you the ad, the pack and the price worked. Ratings tell you what the people who felt like reviewing thought. A 2009 study of Amazon reviews, published in Communications of the ACM, found that 72 to 78 percent of ratings for books, DVDs and videos were four stars or more. When everyone who used a product had to rate it, the ratings came out roughly normal: a few high, a few low, most in the middle.

So the people who quietly stopped buying are counted in your launch sales and rarely heard in your ratings.

Why does the second purchase matter so much to the business?

Because repeat buyers are what make a consumer business cheaper to run.

Nykaa’s IPO filing shows this. Between FY2019 and FY2021, the share of its beauty and personal care sales coming from people who had bought from it in an earlier year rose from 55 to 70 percent. Over the same two years, what it spent on marketing, as a share of its revenue, fell by almost half: from 12.85 to 6.94 percent.

Nykaa is a retailer, so these are people coming back to a shop, not to one brand, and FY2021 was also the year shopping moved online in the pandemic. Still, the filing itself puts that fall partly down to more sales from returning customers. My read is that the same logic holds for a single product: when people come back on their own, you spend less asking them to.

How can you see the second purchase before you scale?

Treat the second purchase as its own number, and hear from people after they have lived with the product, not on the day it arrives.

1. 1Put two numbers side by side: how many households bought, and how many of them bought again. The first mostly tells you about your marketing. The second mostly tells you about your product.
2. 2Call five customers who didn’t reorder. Ask what they use now, and why. It’s an awkward call, and usually a useful one.
3. 3Ask after two weeks of use, not on day one: would they buy it again, at what price, and what would they change first?
4. 4Ask people who gain nothing by being kind: people who fit your buyer, not your friends, staff or loyal fans.

What this means for your brand

A strong launch tells you your marketing worked. Whether your product works shows up later, at home, after the first week, where a brand rarely gets to look. That is the question Foydy answers: people who fit your buyer use your product at home for two weeks, and you get a report on whether they would buy it again, at what price, and why.