Three myths about your returns policy

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. A few things about your returns policy that get repeated more often than they get checked.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

“It only matters for big sites”

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. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

Link it from the product page, not just the footer. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

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
• Hiding it does not reduce returns, only trust — 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.