How to Lower Your Amazon Return Rate
Product return is not only bad for your finances, but also for your seller reputation. Dealing with returns is a big headache for Amazon sellers. It's estimated that between 15 and 40 percent of online purchases are returned. Understanding how to lower your Amazon return rate is very important.
What is Order Defect Rate?
The Order Defect Rate (ODR) is a performance metric that rates the seller's customer service standards on Amazon. The ODR is calculated based on the number of times the negative metrics were incurred divided by the number of overall orders received within a given period of time.
What Happens If My Amazon Return Rate is Too High?
If your product return rate exceeds the permitted percentage, Amazon will send you a performance alert. They will then remove your product page owing to your Order Defect Rate (ODR), and you will need to file an appeal to get your listing reinstated.
Ways to Lower Your Amazon Return Rate
Analyze your previous returns
You need to know the reasons for returns. A customer who has an unhappy experience with your products is more likely to leave bad feedback or a bad review. You can analyze and identify the issues in their reviews to improve your product quality, reduce returns and provide better customer service. You can check the return report by taking the following steps:
• Sign into Amazon Seller Central.
• Select Fulfillment under Report, choose the Customer Concessions option and then click on Returns.
• Select the period for the report. For example, you can filter for 30 to 60 days.
• Check the item in question on the report and identify the reason for the return.
Avoid categories with high return rates
The average return rate on Amazon fluctuates between 5% and 15%. However, in other categories, such as consumer electronics, apparel, and fine jewelry, the return rate can reach 40%. It's recommended to avoid some categories with high return rates.
Here is the breakdown of product returns on Amazon and how a high product return rate could influence the success of your brand:
Typically, products with reasonable return rates have less than 10% returns.
Products like books and media: 5-7%
Home, kitchen, and garden, and sports and outdoors: 8-10%
Consumer electronics: 25-35%
Clothing and fine jewelry: up to 40%
Protect Your Product with Proper Packaging
Items can get damaged during delivery, and it will also cause a product return. First, thoroughly check your products to ensure it is in good condition. Then, take care of the package to keep it safe during delivery. Use poly bags in line with Amazon's specifications, then add stickers to indicate if the goods are part of a set.
Provide Detailed Product Descriptions
A successful product description can not only help you rank higher on Amazon search results, but also convince you to make a purchase. Telling your customers what product they will get in detail will definitely help them to understand your product and lower the possibility to return in case the product didn't meet their expectations. Besides, including high-quality images, videos in your listings will help with sales.
On Amazon, you can only communicate with buyers via the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service, but there are some limitations, such as the trouble of login and logout of multiple accounts to check and respond to buyer emails from different marketplaces, not being able to set up customized templates, or sending a scheduled autoreply. Using Tool4seller's Buyer Message Reply to help you reply customers' messages anytime.
About Tool4seller
A best-in-class Amazon seller tool that is specialized in sales& profits analytics, PPC optimization, keyword research, competitor tracking, instant alerts for listing hijacking, price changing, and inventory updates, etc.
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