Your returns policy: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about your returns policy that come up most often on our calls.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Do we need to care about this?

A clear policy increases conversion more than it costs in returns. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How do we know it is working?

Link it from the product page, not just the footer. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about your returns policy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A clear policy increases conversion more than it costs in returns — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.