Returns and Abuse Protection
Online shopping has made returns a staple of the consumer experience. From the wrong size or color to items that just don’t meet expectations, online sales see a higher return rate with 17.6% or $247 billion of online purchases being returned, of which $24.5 billion were deemed fraudulent1. It’s a growing concern, one that demands retailers’ attention and action to monitor, measure, and curb returns abuse while crafting effective return policies to prevent misuse.
1 https://nrf.com/research/2023-consumer-returns-retail-industry
Use Cases
- Claims
- Adjustments
- Returns
- Exchanges
Returns abuse
While a good portion of returns are genuine, a surge in returns can prove costly for businesses. Some customers deliberately orchestrate malicious returns, exploiting issues in back-office processing or finding loopholes in policies. This abuse isn’t just about excessive returns; it’s about individuals misrepresenting their intentions to take advantage of the system.
Abusive and excessive return behaviors can range from:
Wardrobing
Returning an item after it was worn.
Return Swap
Returning a different item than originally bought.
Falsifying Delivery
Claiming an item wasn’t received.
Shipping Label Fraud
Manipulating the shipping label.
Addressing these varied forms of abusive behavior is vital for businesses. The challenge is to confront the issue without compromising the experience of genuine customers.
We can help. Our purpose-built solution collects customers’ return data and helps you to monitor, measure, and take appropriate and immediate action to prevent returns abuse.
How it works
Our solution activates the moment a customer triggers a return. Merchants send over adjustment data to our specialized API, tracking each customer’s return activity. By monitoring key data points — from email addresses and account IDs to phone numbers, geolocations, shipping addresses, and payment methods — our solution is designed to immediately pinpoint any hint of policy manipulation.
Our robust platform quickly gathers and scrutinizes return data, delivering valuable insights to identify excessive and abusive returners. This equips merchants with the tools needed to effectively manage transactions. Moreover, our deep retail expertise and rich community data gives us a thorough understanding of customer return patterns and behaviors, which empowers merchants to make data-driven decisions and orchestrate meaningful changes while maintaining a seamless shopping experience.
Monitor, Measure, Act
Abuse prevention begins the moment a customer initiates a return. Merchants send final adjustment data to our dedicated API to track customers’ returns behaviors. Accertify monitors returns data that customers may use to manipulate and take advantage of returns policies and arms the merchant with actionable data to use on future claims.
Features & Benefits
Our powerful platform quickly aggregates and summarizes returns data, providing the insights to identify abusive and excessive returners and implement the controls to prevent or allow future purchases.
- Confidently identify abusive actions and excessive returners
- Use native integration with our fraud detection solution
- Reward authentic customers with friction-free transactions
- Enact precise policies and controls to prevent future abuse
- Ability to access data quickly and easily without code changes or IT resources
- Ability to take immediate action
- Identified inefficient or disparate processes that need to be updated and aligned
- Product designed to support evolving business requirements
Results
In an average month, a current client identified 3% of their user base was responsible for 25% of total refund costs.