Although it might seem a little obvious, more listings online than necessary provide a single, blurry photograph of a product. Setting aside some time to go through your current e-commerce listings and ensure that each product has high-quality photos, a thorough description, and videos where necessary is one way to lower your return rates. You’ll need to highlight the size, weight and material of the product in your description to give the customer as much information as they can pre-purchase. To avoid returns due to accidental misselling or product confusion, keep your descriptions current.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money or time filming long films to include them in your product descriptions. You only need a few quick, straightforward movies that provide a 360-degree view of the goods to significantly lower the number of returns your online store receives due to customer uncertainty.
Ask your customers for reviews and reward them for it
You should establish a basic procedure to encourage customers to post a review of your product or service. Where you can, provide them incentives like 10 per cent off their subsequent order. Capterra’s review programme is a great example of how you can use free reward programmes to encourage reviews and reward customers. It invites your clients to post reviews of your services and goods on Capterra and enters them into a drawing for an Amazon gift card as a reward. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that online reviews impact the buying decisions of over 93 per cent of customers, meaning reviews will both increase your sales and reduce your ecommerce returns.
Become a pioneer of outstanding customer service
Provide customers convenient ways to contact you if they have questions or problems with your products. This stops them from becoming frustrated and returning the item because they don’t understand how it works or believe it to be defective. With the standard methods of phone and email, try integrating live chat or instant messaging. This creates a direct link between the customer and your organisation, reducing those unneeded returns and ensuring queries or difficulties get sorted out as quickly as possible.
Prioritise your packaging
Based on what you offer, your packing requirements will be different each item. As a general rule, think about the journey your item or items will take and then decide on the packaging accordingly. Another common reason for returns is when merchandise is delivered broken or damaged due to inadequate packaging (almost 20 per cent of consumers cite this as their primary return reason.
Your packages are likely to be thrown around, dropped, or stacked below heavier goods, so don’t be afraid to use bubble wrap and double or triple lined boxes for fragile items. If a product is not identified as a gift, it should always be labelled with what is inside and storage instructions in case it needs to sit around before it is delivered to the consumer.
Analyse. Adapt. Overcome.
Every return you process needs to be recorded for evaluation. If you’ve never kept track of returns, try it out for a month by highlighting the return reason in an Excel spreadsheet. When the month is over, you can then start to study the numbers and obtain some thoughts on what needs to be changed.
Depending on the reasons will depend on the changes you need to make.
By Yuvraj Malhotra, Co- Founder of Ferroccio
Picture credit: <a href=”https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/e-shopping-cartoon-web-icon-online-store-cashback-service-money-returning-financial-refund-idea-return-investment-internet-income_11669046.htm#query=ecommerce%20returns&position=0&from_view=search&track=ais”>Image by vectorjuice</a> on Freepik
