Product returns: Why it happens and lean ways to reduce them - Part-2

In this blog we will discuss other root causes of  Product returns apart from Customer misplacing the order.  Lets see. Please do read our first post on this - Product returns: Why it happens and lean ways to reduce them - Part-1

Shipping wrong product or different product to customer

• Customer asked for book and you shipped Mobile phone or different Book. It is horrible mistake.

• Customer asked for white color Mobile phone and you shipped Blue color mistake.

• You have to take each and every order and debug the system. How the hell mistake happened? You have to get to the root cause and fix it. Because it won't go with one order otherwise it will soon repeat again. The above thing/bug  is continuous  leakage in your system.

• Take metrics of how many wrong shipments per category, per month and try to improve. 

Product damage due to bad packaging and  courier mishandling

• Bad packing can leads to damage of products and cause product returns. Please do read our previous post on the same  Packaging and labeling of shipments in a lean way
•  It is very thin line to distinguish whether it is courier company mishandling or bad packing. If you are sure it is courier mishandling then you have to figure out a way to stop this.  Either you can stop using that courier company as it is impacting your brand and costing a lot with product returns. You can take a call based on number of damages made by a courier company in a month. In the worse case if you cannot do any thing, try to minimize the usage of that courier company.  This we will detailed cover in courier selection logic/algorithm in our future post.
• You can think of considering the transit insurance on shipments. 

Customer did not like the product

There are tons of reason why a customer did not like the product.

• Quality of the product is misinformed either by merchant or complete product  details were not listed. For example: clothes material is not listed and customer returned them as they are not of cotton.
• Bad product discovery  interface. Some how your website is not able to help the customer choose what they really need. You can focus more on that like - search, selection options, customer reviews. We will cover more about this in later posts. 

The product was damaged when it was procured

Well. it is a learning for you - how it got bypassed the check before sending it to the customer. Well you can get refund on the same by returning it to the vendor.  Read more about this in our next post

Product returns: What you can do with returned items and compensating the customer.