Returns and exchanges are typically viewed as a hassle for everyone—both customers and merchants, alike. While they can create an opportunity for you to show off your customer service skills, they can also create a potentially bad experience for shoppers. For merchants, they create more work to do, and in the worst cases, actually cost the company money in the form of lost shipping fees and lost wages paid to workers to handle a return or even exchange. However, returns and exchanges are inevitable. Your best bet is to make the customer’s lemons into lemonade.
Here are some tips to help minimize returns and exchanges during the busiest of seasons:
1. Head Them Off Early—You don’t want an order that will cost you money in the end, so your best bet is to stop the purchase from happening in the first place. Go through all of your product descriptions and make sure you clearly spell out the specifics of the product. Obviously all products vary, but some ideas to make note of are: dimensions, fabric, care instructions, color (especially where the colors are navy which looks like black), etc. Make sure that you’re not only selling the product, but representing it correctly. This can help you from getting in to a bad situation with a customer who is misinformed as to the product they will be getting.
2. Make It Easy—With every order, include a returns/exchanges form, so that your customers can get merchandise back to you in a consistent way. Clearly state your returns policy on this form, along with any other pertinent information. Ask them to fill in the items they are returning along with a reason code, and include instructions on how to ship it back to you. This way, you can develop a consistent returns process at your office, regardless of the person there who processes the return/exchange package.
3. Limit Time for Returns – While it would be nice to think that we could return any product to anywhere, at any time, this is probably an unrealistic stance for most small business today. Set a time of 30 or 60 days in which to return a product to your store. This way, it will force the customer to decide whether they want to return/exchange in a reasonable timeframe, and you can write the revenue on to your books quicker.
4. Promote Your Policy – Promote your return policy on every page, either at the end of the product description or a link in the footer. The presence of a return policy can actually help boost sales, even if the customer has no intention of ever returning a product
5. Customer Service 101 – Returns and exchanges are a natural part of retail. Since you’re going to have to deal with them at some point, make sure that you make the process as easy on the customer as possible. Use this contact with the customer as a way to personalize your site, and view it as an extension of your site in the form of ‘human’ contact. Respond courteously, quickly, and be personable.
Brought to you by Network Solutions®
