Cyber Monday Tip #6: Your Return Policies

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Matt Sampson - Colorado Web Solutions

Part 6 of our month long Cyber Monday Prep Tips Series. Every day, we have been giving you one small piece of advice to check, fix or confirm within your Yahoo! Store in preparation for Cyber Monday 2009. View Past Yahoo! Store Tips.

Cyber Monday Yahoo! Store Preparation Tip #6: Your Return Policy

Returns were the least favorite part of my 8 years of experience in retail ecommerce. And on the flip side, returns are my least favorite part about online ordering as a customer as well. I’m not alone in these feelings, so you should take extra care to keep your customers as informed as possible about your return policy.

First of all, if you don’t have a return policy online yet, create one asap. You’ll be glad you did. And every time you run into another “strange issue”, you’ll want to update your return policy to cover that as well.

So what should your return policy cover? At the very minimum it should explain; how long your return period is, how to send back an item, do they need to get an RA number? Where do they ship it? Do you suggest that they insure their packages and ship with a service that can guarantee delivery like UPS or FedEx? (HINT: you should!) Do you specify how long it will be before they see the actual credit on their account? Do you need them to include anything in their package other than the product? (Probably so!) Do you allow for exchanges with your returns? Or would you prefer that they re-order online? What happens (what’s the penalty) if they do return an item after the specified return policy window? Who pays for the shipping on returns?

These are all questions that should be answered clearly and firmly in your return policy online. There are a number of other elements that you could include as well, but in order to keep this short, we’ll stop at the basics.

So get onto your site and READ your entire return policy. Do you answer all the questions above? If so, congratulations! If not, get to work today.

Tomorrow I’ll be writing a little bit about twitter and how you can get started immediately using it for your Yahoo! Store.