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Ecommerce Returns Management Process: Best Practices

Sashank Ravindranath — Thu, 19 May 2022 10:35:43 +0000

Returns are an integral part of every ecommerce business. 20% of all ecommerce orders are returned. And this number increased up to three-fold during times like the holiday season.

However, they become a logistical nightmare and a cost center only when they get out of hand in the absence of a proper returns management system.

Therefore, you need to put in your best efforts to manage returns and make them a growth driver for your business. But first, let’s get to the basics.

What is Ecommerce Returns Management?

Returns management is the process of ensuring a smooth returns experience for your customers. This covers the end-to-end of returns — from the moment the customer initiates to fulfilling a replacement if they had requested an exchange.

Ecommerce returns management sits at the very center of reverse logistics, inventory management, and post-purchase customer experience.

Proper returns management helps you boost your bottom line and create loyal customers for life. To help understand it better, let’s take a deeper look at the customer touchpoints in ecommerce returns.

Returns management customer touchpoints

There are several touchpoints or points of interaction between the customer and the ecommerce business in the returns management process. But as we mentioned, it all starts from the moment the customer wants to initiate a return.

1. Customer requests a return on their order

Returns happen for a lot of reasons, some of which have no logical explanation and are simply based on the customer’s emotion.

But in this case, let’s take the example of the customer being unhappy with their order. The customer selects the item they wish to return along with the valid reason (as requested by you).

2. The return request is rejected or approved from your end

When return requests do not meet the conditions you’ve provided, the return request can be rejected and interaction with the customers for this particular order ends here.

On the other hand, if the reason for the return is valid it can be approved from your end and the process for initiating the return gets started.

3. When the order return is in transit

Order returns are in transit from the moment it is scheduled to be collected to the moment it reaches back to your store. These moments are usually leveraged by ecommerce brands to share return status updates.

4. When the product is returned to the store

Once the product makes its way back to your store, you can start collecting the customers’ feedback on their shopping experience with your brand. If the feedback is positive, you can also try convincing the customer to shop for a replacement (if they hadn’t chosen one already).

That’s all from the experience front. In terms of business operations, the product is then sent for inspection. If there’s no sign of damage, the product is re-stocked in the inventory and sold to another customer.

Now that we’ve got better context, here are some of the best practices related to returns management that you can implement for your ecommerce business.

Ecommerce Returns Management Process: Best Practices

1. Have a shopper-friendly returns policy

67% of shoppers check the returns policy before making a purchase

The first thing a shopper checks while wanting to return an item is your store’s return policy. Therefore, make it friendly enough to attract them and encourage repeat shopping.

The best ploy with a returns policy is:

Making it flexible enough in terms of conditions and deadlines
Having it mention your objectives and the customers’ needs clearly
Not encouraging fraudulent returns and wardrobing

This way, there is a win-win situation, and you can still manage to increase conversions without spending too much on acquisition and other unwanted return-related expenses.

Also, make sure your returns policy is easy to find for the customer and display it in areas of clear visibility such as the home page, product pages, checkout page, FAQ section, etc.

2.Promise a hassle-free returns experience

Your customers return their purchase because they were unhappy with something around it, such as fitting, color, damages, etc. They have been excited to get the product on their hands the second they hit ‘buy’. Therefore, mitigate their frustrations by making your returns process seamless.

You can take the hassle out of product returns by enabling your customers to initiate returns directly from the order tracking page instead of spending time searching for it. This helps in improving the return experience and in turn, delights your customers.

You can also extend the seamless returns experience by enabling the customers to print automated and prepaid return labels and get done with their order return quickly.

3. Make the returns process fast and easy for your customers

92% of shoppers say they will buy again if the returns process is easy.

Apart from prepaid return labels, you can also enable customers to initiate returns easily and fast with the help of a returns portal.

Your customers can pull up their orders, select the item they would like to return, provide a reason, select the return method, and voila! Get their returns initiated in less than a few minutes.

Such an experience would give your customers all the more reason to keep shopping with you.

4.Keep your customers in the loop of their returns

Just like order delivery, your customers would like to stay in the know of their return status as well.

Look forward to sending proactive updates on return requests, via automated email and SMS notifications and providing a tracking page that provides complete transparency around return status.

This can keep your customers in the loop effortlessly and eliminate their anxiety about the whereabouts of their returning package.

5. Get smart with your returns

70% of all returns are size and fitting related.

Imagine refunding all these returns and taking a hit on your profit margins amidst the already sky-rocketing shipping costs.

Now, this is where you can get smart with your returns and encourage customers to opt for alternative and efficient return methods such as exchanges or store credits options to ensure revenue retention for your ecommerce business.

You can incentivize your customers to choose these alternatives with prepaid labels, free shipping, bonus credit, etc, and increase revenue retained.

6. Automate your returns management process

25% of ecommerce sites don’t support non-product search queries, like returns or tracking.

This can lead your customers to bombard your support reps and turn out to be tedious for your support team as well as expensive for your business.

You can consider making your returns management process self-service by automating them to prevent such problems.

Automating your returns process can help you:

Free up your support agents to address more pressing issues
Drastically reduce time spent per return request and inbound conversation volume.

FAQs about Returns Management

1. How do ecommerce businesses manage returns?

Ecommerce businesses can manage returns on their own by optimizing their returns policy, setting up flexible return methods, enabling customers to print prepaid return shipping labels, providing proactive updates on return status requests, offering easy variant exchanges instead of refunds, etc or they can make use of a returns management solution like LateShipment.com, that does all the heavy lifting for them.

2. What is the return management process?

3. How can ecommerce businesses reduce return rates?

Apart from following a proper returns management process such as making the returns process seamless and promoting exchanges instead of returns, ecommerce businesses can also reduce returns by optimizing their product pages, engaging customers with product usage information, etc.

4. What percentage of ecommerce orders are returned?

The average ecommerce return rate hovers around 20-30%. Most of them are due to size and fitting issues, purchase of wrong quantity, unclear or lack of usage information, wardrobing, etc.

5. How does a returns experience management software work?

A returns experience management solution such as LateShipment.com helps you delight your customers with:

An easy-to-use return portal
Real-time return tracking and automated notifications
Providing options to predefine rules
Enabling multiple return methods and supporting prepaid labels, etc.

All of this can help you uncomplicate returns for you and your teams.

Bottom Line

Ecommerce businesses must start realizing the fact that returns on their own are not necessarily a bad thing. It is when they’re left unattended they become too much to handle.

On the other hand, the returns experience you provide holds incredible power to boost your bottom line and create loyal customers for life. Therefore, it is time to redefine returns as a growth driver for your business.

To get all things done right before the significant returns season arrives in January, you can make use of a returns management solution such as LateShipment.com.

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10 Important Shipping Carrier Errors That Could Cost Your Ecommerce Business

Revathi Karthik — Thu, 31 May 2018 16:25:56 +0000

Have you looked at your FedEx or UPS invoice lately? Shocked to find your shipping costs at an all-time high? The reality is that FedEx and UPS have slapped a 4.9% shipping rate hike (read more about 2018 shipping rates) forcing merchants to rework their shipping strategy. While retailers are still weighing up the domino effect of these new rates on their bottom lines, they often overlook claiming the money that they are entitled to. Shipping carriers often commit errors in the form of service failures or invoicing mistakes that amount to around 20% of your shipping costs. A deeper inspection of your shipping carrier invoice could reveal numerous hidden money-back spots. However, these errors occur randomly making it a painstaking process for businesses to identify them let alone dispute them.

Luckily, you don’t have to embark on this scavenger hunt alone. At LateShipment.com, we automatically audit your shipping invoice for over 50 carrier errors and recover refunds that are directly applied to your shipping invoice.

Here is a snapshot of the ten most expensive shipping carrier errors that are eligible for refunds

Delayed Deliveries – Sample this: You are a wine retailer who has had a merry sales season. Just when you are toasting your big wins with that chilled Chianti, you are interrupted by a distressed call from your customer. As luck would have it, his favourite bottle of chardonnay was going to arrive late. To keep him happy, you speed deliver another bottle, it’s Christmas after all! But then you get another call and then another. Before you realise, you are flooded with order delivery complaints and end up spending the better part of your holiday salvaging delivery disasters.

The real cost of late delivery is a disjointed customer delivery experience and losing repeat buyers. One harrowing delivery experience could get you blacklisted by even loyal customers.

Damaged shipments – True, when an expensive order is found to be damaged, it causes a dent in your profit margin. But far greater is the resulting negative impact it has on a customer’s brand perception.

Lost Shipment: The message on your customer’s tracking page reads: Delivered to the front porch. When your customer enquires about the package whereabouts, with casual indifference, you quote the delivery status update. Surprise! They don’t even have a front porch.

Lost shipments could turn out to be devastating for retailers and their customers alike. Especially when they are marked as delivered by the shipping carrier.

Residential surcharges: There is a fee applied to packages that are shipped to non-commercial addresses. But what exactly is considered as a non-commercial address? UPS states that a residential surcharge would be applied whenever a package is shipped to any address that is a house and does not have an entrance open to the general public. Let’s say you’ve got an artistically designed, quaint office with a side entrance and a carefully camouflaged garage- it’s quite possible that residential charges will get applied even if it’s situated in the middle of a bustling city.

Address correction charges: Instances of packages delivered to wrong addresses are aplenty. Agreed, the address could be incorrectly mentioned on the package by the shipper. That still does not absolve FedEx or UPS of taking responsibility when packages are delivered to wrong addresses. Nobody wants their brand new purchase sitting on somebody else’s doorstep.

Dimensional weight pricing: When you ship a 3 tier cake or a pound and bench toy that weighs less than 6 lbs, how much do you pay? You may have to pony up the charges for a 13 lbs package. Dim weight pricing is one of the trickiest charges to calculate. Finding an optimal package size for orders remains a challenge for retailers. Pad it, you pay extra. Skimp on the cushion, you face unhappy customers. Adding to worries of a toppled cake, is an application of incorrect DIM weight charges.

Void shipments: Remember those labels that you created but never used? They generally account to about 0.22% of total packages. At an average cost of $5 per shipping label, cancelling unused labels could recover a significant amount, especially if your shipping volume is quite high.

Delivery area surcharges and extended delivery area surcharges: Did you know an additional fee is applied every time a package has to be delivered to residential, rural or commercial rural area? Packages tagged under DAS are charged a $4 – $4.5 whereas those tagged as eDAS are charged a whopping $130-$150. Even more appalling is the fact that there is a good possibility that 20% of your ecommerce orders fall under either of these categories.

Fuel surcharges: The most contentious and least surprising fee applied to a shipping invoice has been fuel surcharge for all service types including ground shipments. Adding to the complexity of validating your invoice charges, fuel surcharges keep fluctuating on a weekly basis.

Duplicate charges: Is it possible to bill a tracking number twice? Tracking numbers theoretically are unique. But in practice, the same tracking number could be assigned to two different orders. Although straightforward and low in occurrence (.07%), depending on the charges that are duplicated, the amount you could save from auditing for duplicate charges could be significant.

Image source: Disneyinstitute

Inspecting each shipping invoice and searching for errors is like playing catch blindfolded. You have no clue where or when you are likely to bump into an error. An automated auditing process, on the other hand, could systematically catch all possible errors and request refunds on your behalf. All you have to do is, say the word: “Audit”! ( And of course follow it up with a 2 minute sign up process with LateShipment.com)

Credits

https://parcelindustry.com

https://ecommercenews.eu/primary-reason-orders-dont-arrive-time/

All charges mentioned are as published by FedEx/UPS

The post 10 Important Shipping Carrier Errors That Could Cost Your Ecommerce Business appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How is AI set to transform logistics?

Bianca Barath — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:43:50 +0000

Plaguing issues that worry logistics companies are diminishing margins, fuel wastage, idle time, turnaround time and speed of deliveries in the supply chain. And Artificial Intelligence can help with these problems. And that is why logistics companies are looking at AI for a fundamental transformation to handle movement of goods. AI is used in tandem with other technologies like Robotics & Automation, 3D Printing, Big Data for best results.

Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google invest a lot of time and money on AI that can be used with real world issues. And one of those is to do with supply chain management of how goods are sent from one point to another. The future of AI in logistics is about driverless cars and deliveries. Drone deliveries are being tested as we read this. Uber has been continually testing its potential with deliveries. The Internet of Things or IoT, the most happening study subject of AI, is most likely to assume to major part of logistics in the future. It offers the possibility to interface just about anything to the Internet and can enable information driven co-ordinations.

We are looking at augmented AI with machine-human interaction and collaboration. Augmented reality offers the “smart glasses”, especially in order picking. These are smart glasses that enable intelligent, hands-free operations. Robots can replace human intervention in warehouses. They are lighter, more flexible, easier to program, and more affordable. As of now, several cutting edge technology majors are using “collaborative robots” that work side-by-side with human employees. These robots are of great help in supporting repetitive and physically demanding tasks in logistics.

Self-driving vehicles have made great inroads in logistics. We also have autonomous forklifts and other self-piloted equipment that greatly optimize warehouse operations. Very soon, we are looking at a future where self-driving vehicles in logistics will be to overcome regulatory and security challenges to deploy autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Amazon made news with its drone delivery service recently. Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can do last mile deliveries to end customers. Though it looks like a great prospect, drones will still require a bit more time before mainstream adoption as of now. But research in the arena looks promising. Drone deliveries could avoid traffic delays that occur on road.

3D Printing is another area that is being studied. There are several products that can, instead of being manufactured in large mass-production facilities and shipped around the globe, be sent to warehouses as product designs. These designs can be digitized and transmitted to small factories closer to the customers. And these smaller factories could manufacture with the help of 3D printing technologies.