Contents
- Setting Return Reasons
- Setting Sub-Reasons
- Other Approaches: Product quality expectations & Overall return experience
- Number of Return Reasons
- Ordering your List of Return Reasons: Rendering accurate return data
- Default Return Reasons
Setting Return Reasons
You can easily navigate to your Return Settings page (former: Returns Policy), and add, edit, or delete reasons for return under its dedicated Return Reasons tab.
The return process is merchants' opportunity to collect valuable feedback on the products, quality control, logistics, and the overall return experience.
Below are some guidelines that could help define reasons for return.
Writing Tips
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Set clear reasons for your customers.
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Avoid wordiness; be concise.
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Replace vague language; be specific.
Writing Return Reasons
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Think of the scenarios in which your customers initiate a return.
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Address reasons by product details and quality, expectations from your customers, and overall purchase & return experience.
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Go through the recommendations as outlined below.
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Create an outline with return reasons along with their respective sub-reasons.
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Think of how you would like to present those to your customers: ordering return reasons.
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Now, you are ready to start creating return reasons in your Return Manager, Return Settings tab.
Example
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Define the return reason
E.g. Catalog for women’s apparel: dresses, footwear, and handbags.
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Select a product: e.g. dresses
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Create a return reason.
E.g. "Did not fit." / "Didn’t fit well."
Once you have written the return reason, you would be able to toggle on Exchange and / or Free Shipping for Returns provided the reason along with its sub-reasons qualify for either option.
Considerations:
- These can be toggled on or off at any time to better suit your business needs.
- These sit on the parent return reason and will apply to all of the sub-reasons.
Please note that a return reason defined as "Exchange” would not render accurate return data, neither would it reflect the customer’s true reason why they chose to initiate the return.
- Once you have set the return reason, create the sub-reason(s).
Setting Sub-reasons
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Go over the product details provided to the customer on your eCommerce platform.
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Start by assessing the product criteria.
In the table below, you would find one way you could approach product criteria assessment:
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With the product in mind, draft sub-reasons. Those should be specific to the return reason.
E.g. "Length did not match size guide measurement".
Other Approaches: Product quality expectations & Overall return experience
Customers may also initiate a return because the product did not match their expectations.
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Consider all the possible use cases: product quality, product details, and others.
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Draft the return reason.
E.g. "Not what I expected".
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Draft sub-reasons.
E.g. "Poor quality".
For those scenarios where the product was defective (e.g. Return reason: "Defective"), shipping is waived; hence, the customer has now free shipping.
In addition, a good way of assessing customers' overall purchase & return experience would be by drafting specific return reasons that would address that approach.
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Draft the return reason.
E.g. "Wasn’t delivered as expected".
(In that scenario, the customer might have bought clothes for a special occasion).
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Draft sub-reasons.
E.g. "Not delivered on time".
Number of Return Reasons
When customers initiate a return, and they are prompted to select a reason for their return, they are presented with a number of reasons from which they would choose the one that best describes their own particular scenario.
Having more than 5 or 6 main reasons would mean that customers would need to scroll to get to their return reason. Hence, grouping return reasons and setting sub-reasons would create a more intuitive experience for them.
Turn a long list of return reasons into a manageable, concise display of main return reasons along with their nested sub-reasons.
Examples
Main reason: "Do not fit"
Sub-reasons: "Too long", "Too short".
As for the number of sub-reasons, it would be recommended to have between 2 and 4.
Effectively nesting sub-reasons will optimize ease of use while providing merchants with measurable insights.
Examples
Main reason: "Did not fit"
Main reason: "Not what I expected"
Main reason: "Received damaged/wrong item"
Main reason: "No longer needed"
Ordering your List of Return Reasons: Rendering accurate return data
Once a well-defined set of main reasons along with their respective sub-reasons have been outlined, think of the order in which those would be presented to the customers.
Customers might feel influenced to select a return reason based on the order on which they are presented to them. This is known as primacy effect. The first return reasons would be receiving more attention as compared to the other ones in the list.
Therefore, when customers select the first return reason which might not reflect their particular return scenario, that would lead to inaccurate return data and subsequent actions merchants would need to take in order to settle that return.
Tips
Reasons such as the following could be placed at the end of the return reasons list:
“Item was damaged”
For this particular return reason, merchants would need to take other steps such as waiving shipping costs as highlighted above. Had the customer chosen this return reason which had probably been placed as the top first reason on the return reasons, merchants would need to follow up on that return in order to either settle, if applicable, or find out the true reason behind that return in order to better assist the customer.
“Other”
Given the general, non-specific nature of this return reason, customers might select this return reason when others would not fall into their own particular circumstances. One way of offering greater granularity to this particular main / primary reason is by adding sub-reasons.
Hence, prior assessment of product criteria as well as overall purchase & return experience would determine how to effectively create and order return reasons.
| Note: One important consideration when creating return reasons on your Return Manager (Return Settings, Return Reasons) is that every new return reason created will be placed at the end of your return reasons list. |
Read our best practice guide for more tips on leveraging return reasons and using customer feedback to improve operations and minimize avoidable returns down the line.
Default Return Reasons
When installing the Returnly App from your Shopify account, and on the Returnly Onboarding flow, you will be presented with 5 default reasons.
Although those are the default ones, they can be easily edited or deleted to better suit your business needs.
You could either add a new main reason there or access the Return Manager, Return Settings dashboard where you could create both main reasons and sub-reasons.
