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?
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.