How to lower your returns.
Want a quick win? Better packaging and faster shipping will lower your returns IME.
I think returns could be one of the areas in which most companies could recover a ton of net profit that is getting lost
Having data is the best way to lower your returns. If you don’t have return data segmented by fabric, color, size, and style, that's the first step.
Next, I would comb the reviews and see what people say anecdotally about your sizing, fabric feel, shipping, and the fit of the garment. There are people, who specialize in fit and construction of garments. If you are a seven figure brand I am going to say you know this and they already went over your line to make it as efficient and well done as you can. Sewing is not the place to make shortcuts but you can optimize using better sewing techniques.
Get all that on the spreadsheet. Look for items with very high return rates and items with meager return rates. I hope that some items will be high-returners and others will be low-returners. You will know how to address that if that is the case.
If you don’t have a post-purchase survey, I would find one. With new customers, you could ask questions like how confident you were that it would be enormous, too big, or too small, whether it would fit just right. You could ask even more detailed questions like: Do we run big or small? What do you like about the field of our fabric and the fit of our garments?
In some cases, you can use all this information with your production team to tweak the product to match the desires of your customers. Or you can adjust the description on the PDP. In my experience, this will help with returns.
Our lifetime return rate is 12.56 to date. I track it daily on a spreadsheet with the rest of my KPI. If it starts to move out of the band that I like, I immediately pull reports and begin to decipher if it is a particular product style, color, or fabric.
Last year, we dropped a product we thought would be a winner. I saw 50% returns quickly, and we had to recall the entire drop.
I have about 30 reviews from customers on this issue. My favorites said that we contacted them and asked them if they would like to return it before they decided to return the garment. We offered to issue them a credit; we let them keep the garment.
In many orders where we issue a credit, people would fill their bags with more items. That was a big winner, and even though we lost some money on the drop, I see it as a save rather than a failure. We also ensured the CS agents understood these people would be agitated because the garment was fantastic but had a fatal defect.