Adapting your return policy during COVID-19

Our social and economic contexts have shifted entirely during this pandemic, and we want to help your business adapt. It’ll be as crucial as ever to make sure that your customers feel confident while shopping in your store. To build this trust, we want to empower you to create consistent return experiences that are adapted to our new reality.

Here are a couple of tips we’ve come up with to help adapt your return policy.

Emphasize Store Credit refunds

In case you missed it, Shopify made Gift Cards available to all plans recently. Now everyone can use the automated Store Credit refunds with Return Magic. You can ask your customers to support you by selecting a store credit refund. Store credits allow you to keep the money in your store, and might help during this difficult and uncertain time.

That’s why we released a new policy template so you can easily automate this: Store Credits available for free and for longer, and regular refunds available for a fee and for 30 days only. Head to your Settings under Policies > Rules and click on “Create a new rule” to add this template to your store. Make sure you edit the return options to fit your workflow, and to update your return policy if need be!

We also encourage you to prompt your customers to select the store credit option by adding some content to your return portal. If you head to your Settings under Portal > Content, you’ll find this blurb we recommend:

Customize it to make sure it’s written with your brand’s voice and tone so it stays consistent with your return policy!

Extend your return window

During the outbreak, most of your customers will be practicing social distancing or even be under quarantine. They might not have access to a post office to drop off their returns. Extending your return window will help your customers feel secure when ordering from your store, knowing that they will be able to return their items to you later on if they need to.

In all cases, we always suggest having a longer return window, and here’s why: longer policies lessen the sense of urgency for your customers, and less urgency means more conversions and more sales. With shorter policies, customers are more likely to return an item that they are still on the fence about, instead of taking the time to make up their minds about it or learn to use it better (and potentially keep the product!). A long policy indicates how confident you are in what you are selling, and it’ll help your customers trust that as well.

Create a new policy for the duration of the outbreak using product tags

A tool you can use for this is to create rules according to product tags. Using this, you can tag all of your products (or only the ones you want to be affected by the new policy) and then create a new rule according to that tag. The rule will only apply to orders from the time the product is tagged; it will not apply retroactively to past orders.

We hope these tips help you in adapting to the current situation. Please don’t hesitate to comment below with your own strategies to share ideas with the community. We are always available to help at support@returnmagic.com, and look forward to hearing from you!