Returns are normal. They need to be considered as a part of making business. No matter if the person didn’t like the item, if it doesn’t fit or if they just changed their mind, it is important to have a clearly defined returning policy in your website or local store.
Discover everything you need to know about product returns.
Returns can be even harder after holiday shopping seasons. According to a lot of surveys, more and more people take the days after holiday seasons to return the items they don’t want or to exchange them for different ones. These can be particularly hard times for businesses since they need to process a lot of returns.
No matter if it is holiday season or not, you want to ensure that you avoid the following return policy mistakes.
3 Return Policy Mistakes You Need To Avoid
Mistake #1: Reshipping Fees Rules Are Not Clear
Whenever you are creating your return policy, you need to make sure that you make it as clear as possible. This will prevent you from spending money from your own pocket just to make a customer happy.
When you are writing your return policy, you need to make sure that you clearly specify who pays the reshipping fees. The truth is that when you want the customer to pay for the fees, you need to explicitly state this on your policy. Otherwise, customers will believe that you will pay for the reshipping fees. This will add a lot of confusion and you may end losing a good customer.
In addition, you need to ensure that you have the reshipping address stated in your return policy as well. This is even more important when the address is different from the one that you are using for sending your packages.
These are the 5 best practices for handling returns.
Mistake #2: The Time For Returns Is Too Big
One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of small business owners do, especially during holiday seasons, is that they have a too broad time for returns.
While this is usually considered a good thing, the time shouldn’t be too tight but it shouldn’t be too broad either. When you decide to offer a broad time for returns to your customers, this may end up hurting your small business. Let’s say that you have a clothing store. As a small business, you don’t have many items in each size. So, you may be preventing your business from growing since you won’t have as many units to sell as if you would if the time for return was tighter.
In case you believe you are offering too many days to return and you want to tighten the period, you should clearly show your customers this change. You can do so on your own local store by having your employees telling this to all customers as well as you can do it in your online store by making the statement right in the beginning of your return policy.
Take a look at the 3 strategies for more profitable returns and exchanges.
Mistake #3: Your Return Policy Is Inconsistent
When it is time to create a new return policy, you need to make sure that it is consistent from the beginning until the end.
While you may think that your policy is consistent, when you run different stores and each one of them has its own rules, you need to change it. Besides, when you have local stores but also a website, you need to be clear about the returning policies for each specific location. This will allow the customer to know exactly what he can expect from your company in case he isn’t satisfied with his purchase for one reason or the other.