Your returns policy for small teams

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Most advice about your returns policy assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to keep

A clear policy increases conversion more than it costs in returns. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

The practical version

Link it from the product page, not just the footer. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. 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 you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.