As an eCommerce business owner, I am sure you are all too familiar with the amount of time processing returns takes for your online store. With more than 30% of all online purchases being returned, the question that we all need to ask is why there are so many returned items in the online shopping space? Especially when traditional brick-and-mortar retail has just under a 9% return rate. That's thirty out of every one hundred items purchased online being returned (for my mathematically challenged compadres). That many returns can really eat away at your eCom store's margins and take away an incredible amount of your time that could be spent marketing and growing your business.
Reduce Returns For Your eCommerce Storefront
Why Are So Many eCommerce Products Returned?
Let’s take a deeper look into some of the reasons so many eCommerce products get returned:
- 20% of all returns are due to the customer receiving damaged goods. Goods get damaged all the time as your eCommerce product travels from carrier to carrier, oftentimes across the country or even world. A lot of times, this can be avoided by changing up how you package your products. 3PLs or fulfillment center companies (like PackYak) can help you choose the best type of packaging for your eCommerce product based on its weight and dimensions. Sometimes outsourcing this to experts can really help alleviate the amount of returns you have to process due to goods being damaged in transit.
- 22% of returned items are being sent back because the customer feels that the product looks different than what they were expecting. Advertise your actual product. Posting high quality product photographs or videos that displays how your eCom product really looks and functions can drastically reduce the amount of eCommerce products you have returned to you. Consumers want to be able to see what the product looks like in real life without having to hope that it looks the same as those stock product photos you posted on your Shopify store.
- 23% of returns are a result of the customer receiving incorrect items. This is one of those mistakes that can so easily be avoided. Mistakes often happen if your order volume picks up to a way higher amount than you are used to and you have to start hiring people to help you out with order fulfillment for your online store. If you are using a fulfillment partner, they should have a near zero error rate when it comes to picking and packing your product. AKA your consumer should hardly ever receive incorrect shipments. If you do use a fulfillment partner, but still get a lot of returns for incorrect items being shipped, then you my friend, must get a free fulfillment services consultation from PackYak. Utilizing PackYak Fulfillment services actually makes it so you never have to deal with eCommerce product returns again. PackYak handles the entire returns process for you and provides door-to-door tracking so you can focus on marketing and growing your business - and it's definitely worth it.
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35% of all returns come from “other” reasons. This one is a bit of a mystery grab bag of reasons - they didn't like the product, they can no longer afford it, etc. We're not gonna dive too deep here, because it feels a bit like a rabbit hole, don't ya think?
"43% of returns are due to damaged goods and incorrect items. Partnering with an eCommerce Fulfillment Services company can virtually eliminate that number, and take returns processing off of your plate entirely."
Analyze Your Online Storefront's Data To Reduce Your Rate of Returns
It is important that you are tracking the reason returns are coming back to you so that you can analyze the data and see what changes need to be made to lower these numbers for you. Part of analyzing this data requires that you have good analytics and attribution processes. One thing that really sticks out from these statistics we've talked about is that 43% of eCommerce returns are due to damaged goods and incorrect items - that's a huge number! You can resolve this massive issue by re-evaluating how you package and ship your eCommerce products. Partnering with an eCommerce Fulfillment Services company can massively reduce that number, and actually take returns processing off of your plate entirely so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. If you want to learn more about what it's like to work with a fulfillment company like PackYak, reach out anytime - PackYak loves to talk fulfillment solutions!
That's all for this week's edition of The New Yak Times, tune in next week and subscribe for more eCommerce pointers!