Returns You Will Handle in January

The volume is predictable

Returns arrive at a fairly consistent rate as a share of orders, and that rate does not change much because it is December.

What changes is that six weeks of orders produce their returns in about two weeks, concentrated in the first fortnight of January.

So the arithmetic is available now: your normal return rate, applied to your expected December volume, arriving in half the usual spread.

A shop that has never done that calculation is surprised every year by something entirely foreseeable.

Work it out before December

• Your usual return rate, as a percentage.
• Expected December orders.
• Multiply.
• Divide by ten working days.
• That is your daily January load.

For most small shops the answer comes out between two and eight a day for a fortnight, which is manageable when expected and disruptive when it arrives unannounced on top of everything else January contains.

Gifts return differently

Which is the part that makes December returns their own category.

The person returning is frequently not the person who bought, so they have no order number, no account, and no receipt.

They may not know the price paid, and they usually want an exchange or a credit rather than a refund to a card that is not theirs.

Decide now what you will do in that situation, because deciding it live, differently each time, is how inconsistency becomes a complaint.

A gift receipt option at checkout in December solves most of it and takes minutes to enable.

Where you cannot, a stated policy for gifts without a receipt is the next best thing.

A worked example

A shop with a five per cent return rate expected four hundred December orders.

That is twenty returns, arriving across roughly ten working days, so two a day.

Two a day is nothing, which was itself the useful finding, since they had been treating January returns as a looming problem.

What actually took the time was that eleven of the twenty were gifts with no order number, each requiring a search and a decision.

The following year they enabled gift receipts and wrote a two-line policy for gifts without one.

The same volume took about a third of the time.

Decide the restocking rule now

Which is where the money is.

For each returned item: back into stock, sold as reduced, or written off.

Write the rule down rather than judging each case, since judging each case in January means most things sit in a box until March.

Anything unopened and in season goes straight back, anything seasonal goes into a clearance section immediately rather than waiting eleven months, and anything damaged is written off on the day.

Seasonal stock returned in January and put away until next November has tied up money for a year for no reason.

That single decision is worth considerably more than any handling efficiency.

Refund promptly, whatever the policy says

Which is the reputational half.

A refund processed on the day it is received produces no further contact.

One held for the fourteen days your policy permits produces two messages and occasionally a payment dispute, which costs more than the refund.

The policy exists as a boundary rather than as a target, and using the whole of it is a false economy.

Tell the customer the day it is sent and say how long their bank will take, since the delay after that is not yours and gets blamed on you anyway.

Most disputes in January are about silence rather than about money.

Read what came back

Which is the part everybody skips.

Keep a one-line note per return: what it was and why.

Twenty of those tells you whether a product is wrongly sized, whether a photograph is misleading, or whether a description is missing something.

One product accounting for a third of your returns is a page to fix rather than a run of bad luck.

That is twenty minutes of reading in February and it reduces next year's rate.

It is also the only return data most small shops will ever have access to.

Say the January position in December

Which prevents a share of the contact.

Put the returns window, extended or not, on the product page and in the confirmation email during December.

Somebody buying a gift on the tenth wants to know it can go back in January, and saying so converts hesitation.

An extended window costs very little, since the returns arrive in the same fortnight either way.

State it as an actual date rather than a number of days, which removes the arithmetic entirely.

Handle them in one sitting a day

Which is a small operational choice that changes the whole fortnight.

Processing returns as they arrive means being interrupted eight times a day by something that takes four minutes and breaks concentration for fifteen.

Set one time, work through everything that came in, and leave the rest until tomorrow, which turns a scattered nuisance into a defined half hour.

The customer notices no difference, since a refund issued at four in the afternoon is the same to them as one issued at ten.

January is also when everything else you postponed in December comes due, so protecting the rest of the day matters more than usual.

The counter-case

Some shops have almost no returns.

Food, personalised items, and anything consumed on receipt produce a rate low enough that none of this is worth planning.

An extended returns window also encourages returns at the margin, which is a real cost for a shop with a high rate already.

And a business selling services rather than physical goods has an entirely different January to plan for.

Calculate the volume now, enable gift receipts, write the restocking rule down, refund on the day, and note why each came back.

What to do

1. Calculate the volume.
2. Enable gift receipts.
3. Write the no-receipt policy.
4. Decide the restocking rule.
5. Refund on the day.
6. Note why each came back.
7. State the window in December.

Step four is where the money sits, since seasonal stock returned in January and put away until next November has tied up cash for a year to no purpose.

The policy side is covered in returns in January.

Frequently asked questions

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