Your returns policy: what to get right first

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you only fix one thing about your returns policy this quarter, make it the first item below.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Start here

A clear policy increases conversion more than it costs in returns. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Then this

Hiding it does not reduce returns, only trust. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Eventually

Link it from the product page, not just the footer. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about your returns policy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Link it from the product page, not just the footer — 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.