Retail Returns Planning

Retail Returns Planning

Dealing with returns from customers can be a daunting task, from expired products to wrong deliveries to products endangering lives and so on. Retailers have seen it all, working so hard on presenting a product with the hope of getting high level of customer satisfaction only for hopes to be dashed as those products are returned angrily. As everything is in this volatile industry, retailers should always have a plan to handle these returns to recover their punctured value. Strategies have to be drafted and well implemented to get the best out of those distasteful returns.

The logistics team of the retail business work tirelessly all year long in the movement of high volumes of goods into stores. The logistics team is responsible to separate the good from the bad, processing all aspects that go into the production of the goods to reduce costs and also to mitigate the loss of returned goods. Retailers have begun to see the importance of logistics in their team and more efforts have been made to enhance the team’s performance. The logistics team seems to extract a lot of value from the returned goods, analyzing different aspects of the product, why it was returned and how it can be repackaged to redeem its image. Asides the demanding nature of the logistics team’s jobs, retailers need to identify trends that characterize a particular product, analyze competitors before releasing a product. Better use of data and tighter regulation are other techniques retailers can employ to remove the bitter taste of returns.

Retailers, however, walk on very tight ropes in the case of returns in retail. Even if the customer legitimately returns the product, the retailer still had to deal with the complexities that come with those returns, broken parts, product malfunctioning, bad packaging and others. In addition, retailers still have to make the returns very easy for the customers. Creating a good return to a customer gives the retailer greater competitive advantage as the customer who may be frustrated as a result of the product complications but is in high praise of the manner through which such problems where regularized.

Another way of managing returns on retail is by employing the services of third party logistics (3PL) to manage the returned products. Retailers reduce cost by getting technicians to repair the damaged product. This once damaged product becomes fully functional now maybe not as good as new but pretty descent, retailers therefore reap the benefits of 3PL by auctioning the product or selling to the secondary market which will eventually lead to the recovery of the initial loss.

Conclusively, identifying the problems and analyzing what went wrong can help retailers reshape products design and section to suit the customers. The analysis helps retailers make better and informed decisions on the next phase or plan to adopt when selling a product. The very essence of returns planning is turning a bad situation into a good one, making the best out of those seemingly difficult phases.