From where you are sitting a return is the tail end of a sale running backwards. Something arrives, somebody checks the state of it, the money goes back out the door, the goods go on a shelf or in a bin, and the line gets marked done. That is the whole of how it gets counted in nearly every shop going, and it is how the process comes to be built in the first place, on account of nobody ever sitting down to design the thing from the customer’s end of it. What is actually going on at the other end is a person stood in their own hall with your goods in their hands, still wanting the thing they wanted a fortnight ago, working out that very week whether they will ever go and buy off you again, and no dashboard anywhere has a place to put that.
The box down the back of the returns shelf
You find these in July, mostly, when the shelf in the back has to be cleared out for the new season and the job can be put off no longer. It is a job one does the once and resents twice.
Down at the far end of it, behind the stack of whatever did not sell, there is a box gone soft with the damp. Inside is the thing that came back, hardly used, and folded on top of it a note in biro on the back of the dispatch slip. Three lines of biro. It was grand, they liked it, the size was wrong by one and could they have the next one up in the very same style before the season started. That was the whole of the ask.
That note is eleven months old, mind you. The refund went out two days after the parcel landed, which by every measure anybody puts on a returns process is good service, no two ways about it. Nobody wrote back to the person. The goods went into stock and the note stayed in the box along with them, on account of nobody in the place knowing what else you would do with a bit of paper.
Go and look the customer up afterwards and the pattern is nearly always the very same one. A couple of orders over the previous few years, a decent enough customer for a shop your size, and not a thing off her since that month.
What the process does with a note
Whoever opened that parcel did exactly what the sheet on the wall told them to do, which was check the item, mark it received, put the refund through, next. That is the process working, mind you, not the process failing. The sheet said nothing at all about notes. There was no box on the screen for what the customer actually said, and there was nothing anywhere that would have carried three lines of biro out of the back room and in front of the person who could have put the right size in the post that afternoon.
So nobody on your own side did a single thing you could fairly call careless, and the customer went away with her money in her hand and without the thing she had gone and asked for twice.
Why a refund gets counted as a job finished
The counting is most of the root of it, truth be told. A refund is an easy thing to count. It has a date and an amount on it. There is a tidy end to it as well, and at the finish of the month you can say returns were processed inside two days on average, which reads like a shop doing right by its customers.
Now take the same Tuesday in your own back room with an exchange sat in front of you instead. There is a conversation to be had first. Then a stock check, then a second parcel to go out, then somebody minding the whole of it until the right thing is sitting in the right hall, and none of that lands on a report anywhere in a shape anybody will thank you for. Whoever is on the parcels in September with forty of them stacked behind him is going to pick the two day refund, and he is going to be right to, given what he has been asked to optimise.
There is a quieter reason under that again. Refunding feels like the honest thing to be doing, the generous thing even, on account of it being what you understand the customer to want. Only nobody asked her. She wrote down what she wanted on the back of a dispatch slip and the process handed her money instead, which is a clean answer to a question she never put.
The fitting is happening in somebody else’s hall
Over a counter the fitting takes ten or eleven minutes, plainly said. Somebody measures, brings out the two of them, watches how it sits, and the wrong size never once leaves the premises. Nobody calls that a return. It is the middle of the sale and it always was. No shop counts it anywhere.
Sell the same goods by post and there is no counter and no measuring. Your customers do the fitting them selves, in their own halls, and they can only go at it after the parcel has arrived and the money has already changed hands. The fitting still happens, every bit as much as it did over the counter, it just happens the week after with a courier stuck in the middle of it, and on any shop selling a thing that gets worn or fitted or installed that is most of what a return actually is.
Once you have it that way round the mail stops being admin. Those eleven minutes at the counter were a conversation, questions and answers going back and forth, and the postal version of them is a couple of messages inside the day. What most shops put in place instead is a form and a label, which is efficient the way closing early of a Friday is efficient.
You can see the whole of it in what people write to you. Hardly anybody sends a thing back because they have gone off it. They send it back over the size, or the fit across the top, or it rubbed, or it was the wrong shade against what was on the screen, and every one of those has a next order sitting inside it somewhere. Which is to say that a fair share of what comes back is somebody telling you their measurements, at their own expense and without being asked, though it rarely gets read that way in a back room in September.
What tightening the policy actually buys you
When the returns figure climbs the instinct is to make returning harder, and the ways of going about that are well known to anybody who has sat in the meeting. The window comes down to a fortnight. A charge goes on to cover the restocking, or people are made ring for a number before they send anything back at all. It reads like control, it is a great deal easier to put in place than any of the other options going, and it does move a figure on a report. The figure moves. That much is true.
Where the whole of it goes is the question nobody asks after. Some of it goes and turns into card disputes, and one of those will cost you the money and the fee and the guts of an afternoon on top of it again. Some turns into mail arguing the toss, which is your own people being paid to lose an argument. And an unknown share of it, the part you will never once see, keeps the wrong thing and quietly never comes back to you, and there is no report in the world that will show you those.
The published figures for how much comes back off an online shop run anywhere from the low teens to a third or worse depending on what you sell, with anything sized at the bad end of it. Take whatever your own number is and set it beside your retention rate for the same season, since the two of them together say something neither one says on its own. A shop can drive returns down a few points and lose more than that again out the far side of the year, and the two figures sit in different reports, so nobody ever puts the trade in front of you.
The one question worth putting into the process
There is a change here that costs nothing at all, and it is a small enough one in its self.
Every return that comes in gets read before it goes and gets processed. Not sorted, not measured against the policy, read, and it will take whoever is on the parcels about the minute each. If there is anything at all in it about size or fit or the wrong colour, the refund waits and somebody writes to the person that same day with the one question. What would suit you better. That is the whole of the intervention and there is nothing else to it.
A share of those come back as an exchange rather than a refund. What that share is on your goods you will know inside one season, and it will be worth having, and it is not really the point of the thing either. The point is that a person who has been asked what would suit them will nearly always write back to you her own self, whereas somebody who has just been refunded has no earthly reason to write to you ever again, and there are no two ways about that one.
The ones that stay refunds mostly stay refunds for a good reason, fair is fair. The thing was grown out of, or bought for a job that fell through, or the money is wanted before the electricity bill is. A share of what comes back was never once going to turn into anything else, and talking somebody out of a refund they need is not a trade any of us should be at. Trying it would cost you more than the returns ever will.
What we make, and the price of it
Since this is our own page we may as well say what we sell before you read any further, and the fit here is a narrow one.
Maxdesk is the name on the thing we build, and what is in it is a help desk sitting on one shared inbox. The only bearing any of that has on returns is the memory of it. Every message off a customer rests under their own address in the one thread, whoever answered it and however long back that was, so the mail about the size four in September is still there in June when the same woman writes in about something else entirely, and whoever picks it up can see it all for them selves without going asking anybody. What you are billed for is the workspace, and the number of people you put into it does not come into the pricing anywhere, which for a shop going from two on the parcels in July to five in the last week of August is the difference between hiring for the season and thinking twice about it.
The free plan has a price on it all the same and you should have that weighed before signing up to anything. Your history rolls three months, which on a seasonal trade is genuinely awkward. Supporting ads run inside the workspace where your own people are working away, though nothing of the sort ever appears in what the customer receives. Our branding sits along the bottom of outgoing mail as well. Pay twenty dollars a month on a workspace and the ads come off it, the mail goes out under your own name, and a year of history stays where you can reach it. At ninety nine there is an AI layer over the top of that and two years to look back through.
What this will not do for you
We are not returns software and it would be a poor way to start if we let that sit. There are no return labels in Maxdesk, no RMA numbers, no refund going through it, no restocking rules and no hookup to your shop platform or your courier. None of that is in there. If the label and the tracking and the money going back on its own is what you are after, go and buy the thing that does all that, since we have not got it, and building it is on no list of ours anywhere.
The three month history is a worse fit on this subject than on most and we would rather flag it than have you find out on us. Returns arguments do not arrive on time. A thing that comes apart at the seam in November belongs to an August order, and on the free plan that August is gone by then, so you are taking the customer’s word for what was said in it. On the paid plans it is sitting there. That is a real reason to pay us rather than a feature anybody should be proud of.
And we read mail and nothing else. If the return conversation happens over the phone, or on your shop page, or by somebody walking in with a bag under their arm, none of it reaches us and none of it is in the thread. Plenty of small shops do the bulk of that talking over a counter, so for a good share of readers here this covers the one part of the problem and no more than that. Our piece on ecommerce customer service has more about where that line falls, and the customer care one is largely about why speed on its own buys you less than people expect. For how the mail side of it works there is email management software.
The biggest thing on this page has no software in it whatever, which is worth saying plainly on a page trying to sell you some. Reading the parcel before processing it is a habit, and one person doing that for a minute a parcel is the whole system. The tool comes second here and does the smaller half of the job. Anybody putting it the other way round is selling you something and has gone quiet about which part of it does the work.
Twenty parcels and an afternoon
Go back through the last twenty returns you took, whatever season they fall in, and open each one properly rather than glancing down the line in the report.
Beside each one mark whether the customer said anything at all about why it was coming back, and most of them will have done, in the mail or on the slip or in the form. Mark as well whether anybody wrote back to them before the refund went through, which is the column that tends to do the damage. Then go and see whether that person has bought anything off you since. An afternoon will do the twenty easy enough and you will not need a spreadsheet for any of it.
The pattern nearly everybody turns up is that the first column is fuller than they expected and the second one is near enough empty. If that is what you get then whatever you have on your hands is not really a returns problem, it is a conversation the process was built to close off quickly, and it closes off at about the one moment in the year when that customer was most inclined to spend money with you. Start with the sized goods and anything over whatever amount matters in your trade, since those are where the swap is worth the postage twice over.
And keep the note out of the box. Whatever the customer wrote on the back of that slip is the only bit of the whole return that is worth anything to you next season, and at the minute it is going in the bin with the packaging.