Had an interesting situation occur during our black friday sale today I thought I’d share. My e-commerce stores return policy is you can return for any reason within 30 days of purchase. We also had our Black Friday sale today which had a pretty substantial discount on certain products. Some of my more conniving customers realized that they could request a return / price adjustment for their item they purchased up to 30 days ago as my return policy states they have 30 days to return the item.
I’m of the mindset I should just take the L on this. Based on the rules I set they are allowed to do this. And customer service / public perception is important. I find the situation both annoying and amusing. I can’t blame them for doing this but I do think there’s something to be learned here. Part of me wants to implement some kind of restocking fee in the future, but also people expect returns to be free these days.
As i’m curious, what would others do in this situation? Suck it up? Try to weasel out of the obligation? How would you craft a return policy in the future to avoid this kind of thing?
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This is a classic example of how to business … ALWAYS focus on customer satisfaction … in such cases, hands down offer a price match with no questions asked. It will ensure they can trust you to be there for them and will lead to more word of mouth promotions. Also learn for the big guys! Best buy offers price matches from October all the way to January to cater to those who are resistant and will FOMO over Black Friday and boxing day sales. ALWAYS put yourself in a customer’s shoes regardless of what you sell and how much you sell for. I put Black Friday discounts on from Nov 1st and encourage clients to buy reduce my traffic volumes and for them to get whatever they want before it sells out.
Running a business and dealing w/ clients day by day just makes u realize how fukt ppl are. They’ll abuse any business like some “big bad corporation” n try to leech anything and everything out of em
Correction they don’t get away with this at true big corporations as easily. Therefore they take advantage of small business.
What? This is common place with big companies.
I’ve honestly never had this happen but I am cautious about when I run sales so timing doesn’t overlap.
How many customers is it? Hopefully just one or two and you can take the L and move on? If they are a repeat customer DEFINITELY take the L. Do them a solid and they’ll be back again.
I think i’m at 6 or 7 out of about 100 sales. Analysis of if they’d be a return customer would be a worthwhile part of how I should handle the situation conversation.
It depends upon your business and product. If I’m selling commodity goods, your approach is understandable. For my product and demo, I have to be a hard ass. Product is limited and highly desirable. I can pretty much pick and choose who I sell it to.
Fair enough! Given your product type it makes sense people would come back and try to get the discount.
suck it up. There probably are only a handful that will do it, right?
It’s cheaper to give the discount than it it is to pay for return shipping, credit them, and then they buy it on sale.
NGL, I bought some electronics stuff on amazon this yr, then literally 1 day later was the prime day where the tech gadget was half off. I did chat support they said no they wouldn’t honor the discount, so I returned it and bought a new one. I just kept thinking they probably wasted $30 between various shipping, processing labor and all this other junk. I felt bad (as bad you can for mega corporations since the tech was from a megacorp and Amazon itself is), but it was a few hundred bucks that I wanted back!
And for amazon, I imagine since they’re so humongous quite a few people do it and i was surprised they wouldn’t honor the discount because I was 24hrs early.
What you can you do is when you send your email blast for Black Fri is NOT send it to people who purchased in the last 10 days or whatever.
Return and rebuy is a normal thing. Unless you have a clause against this, you should honor it.
With that said, you should change your return policy to state customers are not allow to rebuy the same item unless it’s returned in brand new, unopened condition.
I don’t want to incentivize false returns but I do agree the return policy needs work.
Slightly different because I have a service business that sells parts, but I only accept returns for actual manufacturing defects, not damage, not price differences, not buyer’s remorse.
If they don’t like it, they can call someone else.
but also people expect returns to be free these days.
People expect a lot of things. They don’t always get what they want.
It’s within your policy.
Not your customers fault for wanting to save.
You must have done a great deal.
That is to a degree my thoughts on this. I don’t blame the customers necessarily but I do need to improve my policies.
Absolutely! Reason to improve.
7 day return
Return the difference to everyone who purchased in the last 30 days. Don’t wait for them to contact you. The goodwill from this will be worth it.
That would cost me thousands of dollars for no good reason. If people are fine with it I don’t see a reason to convince them otherwise
You could also consider adding a “price match guarantee” or something similar. Offer to refund any price change in your store for 14-days or 30-days or whatever time period to at least save the hassle to you of them returning & re-purchasing. It also helps customers buy more confidently if sales are common in your store since they know they’re eligible for any upcoming discounts
If you really want to cut it close, you could do the refund as an in-store credit rather than a direct refund, but I’d tread lightly depending on your relationship with your customers. The in-store credit is easier to pull off if you also have a restocking fee because the restocking fee deters the return & repurchase cycle
Totally normal request on their part, 30 day is too long, change to 7 days after receipt.
Price adjustment will be cheaper than the return - so I’d do that whenever possible. It’s probably worth earning the good will!
I’ve considered excluding customers who made a purchase in the last 30 days from email blasts promoting the sale… just one idea. Won’t solve the problem but would help perhaps - depends on your products.
Honestly, excluding customers who purchased in the last 30 days from sales is a great idea
Can you offer a price match for purchases up to 30 days before via store credit? While calculating items going on sale you can run an estimates according to last 30 days of sales on what you may end up giving credit to on the previous customers based on % of customers that actually take advantageous of it. Not all will be bothered with even doing it.