What is the difference between free and customer-paid returns?

One of the many ways to keep your customers happy with the best post-purchase experience is to provide a seamless and not to mention, free returns for your customers. However, for most brands, to keep their return cost low, customers are expected to bear the shipping fees to have their returns delivered back to the warehouse. 

How do I get customer-paid returns set up?

Our app allows you to offer both free and/or customer-paid returns. For example, free returns can be offered to customers with damaged item return request whereas a change of mind request has to be customer-borne. You can get this set up in 'Customer borne reasons' under Policy Rules which comes as a standard rule across all plans.

All you'll have to do is define the return reasons that should be customer-borne. In this example here, I have enabled 'Change of mind' as a customer-borne reason. This would mean that when the customer selects 'Change of mind' as a return reason, they would be expected to bear the shipping fee to return their items back to you. 

How does the customer make payment to receive their shipment label?

There are a few ways we can handle this - via payment link, customers make their own return arrangement and deducting the shipping fee from their final refund/store credit amount.

• Payment link
  A payment link will be emailed to your customer after you have approved their return request. Note that this payment link option is only possible if you have connected your preferred carrier account to our app or are using one of our carrier accounts. Upon successful payment, the shipment label will be automatically emailed to your customer. We do charge your customers a small processing fee to process the payments via our app.
  
  For those who have connected their carrier account to our app, all shipping fees paid by your customers will be reimbursed to your nominated bank account at the beginning of the next calendar month to compensate for the shipping charges that will be invoiced by your carrier partner.
  
• Customers make their own return arrangement
  Instead of automatically generating a shipment label for your customers, you can get your customers to make their own return arrangement to deliver the items back to your warehouse by either enabling the 'Mail' option or creating your custom shipping method.
• Deducting shipping fee from final refund/store credit
  This option is only possible if the customer has requested for either a refund or store credit. You can continue generating a shipment label for the customer but upon resolving the return request, you can choose to deduct the shipping fee amount from the final refund/store credit amount. However, by doing this, your tax amount may be pro-rated accordingly.

How does free return work?

Free return is essentially you bearing the return shipping fee on behalf of your customers.

For those who have connected their carrier account to our app, you will be invoiced as per your existing billing arrangement with your carrier partner.

For those who are using one of our carrier accounts, we will be invoicing you the shipping charges for all returned shipments separately outside of Shopify at the beginning of the next calendar month.

Click here to find out more about our label shipping fees.