Say bye to returns: Four simple strategies to raise your exchange rates online
While the internet is home to our biggest time-sucks, like bingeable TV shows, 24/7 news cycles, and cat memes, it also helps us efficiently live our daily lives. In retail, internet efficiencies can encourage exchanges online. You can help customers get the right size, color, or style product shipped to their home in just a few clicks – and save the sale in the process.
Here are a few simple strategies your team can implement immediately to do just that:
1. Focus on incentivizing the exchange.
Retailers focus on reducing return rates, but too many executives overlook the opportunity to retain revenue by optimizing exchanges. Instead of returning an item, encourage shoppers to exchange for a better fit by offering a discount on a future purchase.
2. Limit exchange and return reasons.
Be smart about the return reasons your customers can select when returning online. Make them short, sweet, and to the point. Limit them to areas you can actually address. Our data shows less than eight is ideal, and three to five is best.
3. Offer one-click exchanges.
Use integrated software to intelligently suggest new colors, products, and size variants based on the return reasons provided. The more legwork your team does to help the shopper exchange, the more likely they are to do so.
4. Take customer service calls out of the equation.
Shoppers are often deterred from exchanging when they need to call customer service to make it happen. That often means they’ll simply request a refund instead. The more you empower self-service, the more you encourage shoppers to exchange.
Products represent more than just utility to your shoppers. They’re symbols of what we can become and who we want to be. Your products are there for big life-changing moments, like buying a house or walking down the aisle, but they’re also there for all the moments in-between, like walking a dog or grabbing a smoothie.
So when a product doesn’t fit into a customer’s life, it’s important to make the exchange or return process feel the way the customer wants to feel—supported, understood, and heard. Your products complement customers’ lives, and your online exchange or return process should do the same.
Want to learn more? For more revenue retaining strategies and ideas, download our eBook: 20 Ways to Optimize Exchanges & Better Returns in 2020.
Sanaz Hajizadeh
Senior Product Manager
Sanaz Hajizadeh is the Senior Product Manager at Happy Returns. With over a decade of experience in companies ranging from Aerospace to Media and Publishing, she most recently served as Product Manager at SpaceX. Before that, she worked as the Product Owner and Senior Business Analyst at Univision Communications Inc.
