How post-purchase ratings differ above and below 500 employees
SMB here means a company with fewer than 500 employees — the cut these figures are scoped to. Each platform is shown twice where the data allows, but on this page it mostly does not: only Narvar has enough ratings from companies of 500 and above for a scoped average to be reported. The figures across all interviews live on what returns and post-purchase buyers wish they'd known.
| Platform | Under 500 | 500 and above |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | not rated | |
| Shipment tracking and notifications. The highest figure here, on few enough ratings to carry no decimal. | ||
| 8 | not rated | |
| Post-purchase upsells at the checkout and thank-you page. Also rounded to a whole number, and 91% of its ratings come from this group. | ||
| 7.7 | not rated | |
| Returns and exchanges for Shopify stores. The second-best-sampled platform with this group. | ||
| 7.2 | not rated | |
| Merchandising and upsells that sit across the cart and post-purchase flow. The best-sampled platform here with this group. | ||
| 7 | 7.6 | |
| Tracking and returns for larger retailers. The only platform here that can be compared across the line, and the only one whose ratings are mostly companies of 500 and above. | ||
| not rated | not rated | |
| Branded tracking pages. Too few buyers in either group rate it for a scoped average to be reported. | ||
| not rated | not rated | |
| Post-purchase communications, more common in Europe. Too few buyers in either group rate it for a scoped average to be reported. | ||
Two things about that table are worth stating plainly. The top two figures are rounded to whole numbers because each rests on fewer than twenty-five ratings from this group: AfterShip's underlying average is 8.8 and AfterSell's is 8.2, rather than a full point apart. And only one row can be read across: Narvar reads 7 with this group and 7.6 with companies of 500 and above, while for the other four the corpus cannot say how they read with larger companies at all.
How much of a published rating is buyers your size
Every platform above also carries a figure across all interviews. This is what sits behind those figures — the share of each platform's ratings that comes from companies under 500 employees.
Share of each platform's buyer ratings that comes from companies under 500 employees. The bars run 0 to 100% and are not on the rating scale used in the table above.
Every platform here draws at least a third of its ratings from companies under 500, and four of the five draw two thirds or more. Narvar at 33% is the only one whose published figure rests mostly on companies of 500 and above. For the other four the scoped figure and the published figure draw largely from the same rating population.
The counter-current: whole numbers at the top, and one row that can be read across
Three cautions come with this table. The top two figures carry no decimal because each rests on fewer than twenty-five ratings from this group, so 9 and 8 are further apart as published than the underlying 8.8 and 8.2. The observed ordering remains the same; the published whole numbers exaggerate the distance between them. Four of the five platforms have no reportable figure for companies of 500 and above, so this page cannot say how buyers at larger companies would rate them. And a satisfaction average is not a fit assessment — none of these figures tells you whether a platform handles your carrier mix, your return rate, or the exchange flows your customers actually use.
What this means if you are an SMB
A rating scoped to companies your size is closer to a peer benchmark than a corpus average, and it is still an average. Our read, not a practice buyers describe, is that the share behind a figure matters alongside the figure. On this page, four of the five platforms already draw most of their ratings from companies under 500, so their published and scoped figures draw largely from the same rating population.
Want this read against your own stack?
Get my read →The narrow version is that for most of this category the published figure and the size-scoped figure are close to the same evidence. Narvar is the exception in what can be compared: it is the only platform here rated mostly by companies of 500 and above, and the only one with enough ratings to observe a figure on both sides of the cutoff. The same ordering also appears at the tighter cutoff checked here: among companies under 200 employees, the same five platforms remain reportable and land in the same order. The questions that actually separate two finalists are the ordinary ones a rating cannot answer: which carriers a platform supports natively, what the exchange flow looks like to a customer, and what happens to the bill as order volume grows.
For what buyers report after choosing, see what returns and post-purchase buyers wish they'd known. The same split across other categories is in does company size change how buyers rate software, and the rest of this series in which review platform SMBs rate highest.
Common questions
What is the best post-purchase platform for a small business?
Among the platforms rated by buyers at companies under 500 employees, AfterShip carries the highest observed published average at 9 and AfterSell is next at 8. Both are rounded to whole numbers under the reporting rule: AfterShip's underlying average is 8.8 and AfterSell's is 8.2. Loop Returns reads 7.7 and Rebuy 7.2 on larger samples from this group. None of this establishes a best fit for any particular company: these scores measure buyer satisfaction rather than fit.
Do post-purchase platforms rate differently for small and large companies?
On this page only one platform can be compared that way. Narvar reads 7 among companies under 500 employees and 7.6 among companies of 500 and above. For the other four, too few buyers at companies of 500 and above rate them for a scoped average to be reported at all, so the corpus cannot say how they read with larger companies.
Does the ordering change among companies under 200 employees?
Not in this analysis. At the under-200 cutoff, the same five platforms remain reportable and appear in the same order, with AfterShip highest and Narvar lowest.
Should an SMB trust a published software rating?
It is a starting point rather than a peer benchmark, and the company-size mix behind it is useful context for interpreting the figure. On this page four of the five platforms draw two thirds or more of their ratings from companies under 500, so their published figures and their scoped figures rest largely on the same buyers; Narvar draws about a third. Our read, not a practice buyers describe, is that a scoped figure is closer to a company-size-matched benchmark than a corpus average, though it remains an average and the number of ratings behind it still matters.
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