Mastering Returns for Beauty Brands
Navigating the world of returns for beauty and fragrance products can be daunting, with challenges ranging from assessing eligibility to handling damaged or opened items. Leveraging our extensive experience with leading beauty and fragrance brands globally, we’ve gathered key strategies to help you streamline your return process and keep your customers delighted. Here are our top strategies from global partners like Kopari Beauty, Creed, and Àerre.
1. Create an insights-driven return process
Each return is an opportunity to understand your customers' preferences and improve your products. By capturing insights during the return process, brands can reduce future returns and gather valuable feedback.
Our Questions feature allows you to ask specific questions during returns. For instance, Creed uses this feature to gather detailed feedback on "change of mind" returns. All responses are exportable, enabling detailed segmentation of return data.
2. Retain and upsell revenue from exchanges
Shopping for fragrances can be delicate. If the scent doesn't quite match the customer's preference, make exchanges as easy as possible so they can still end up with the right product in their hands!
Beyond exchanges, Àerre has also tapped into PostCo’s upsell features, encouraging customers to consider higher-value items during the exchange process. Àerre even sweetens the deal for customers by offering Bonus Credit to apply towards a new item. This not only incentivizes customers to opt for exchanges over refunds but also presents a prime opportunity for upselling. In fact, Àerre earns an extra $10 for every successful upsell exchange.
3. Disable returns for personalized items
For beauty brands, it's beneficial to disable returns for personalized items, such as engraved or customized products. Creed utilizes the Order Tag in their policy rules to automatically mark these items as non-returnable.
4. Only ensuring that resellable items are being returned
Handling returns for perishable items like cosmetics can be challenging - especially if the products have been opened! For hygiene reasons, it's often preferable to allow customers to keep their products rather than returning them. This is more cost-effective since items that have been opened are typically not in resellable condition!
The Keep Item feature allows customers to retain items when requesting a return. This not only saves costs on labels for low-value or damaged products but also boosts customer satisfaction by offering quicker refunds or exchanges.
Kopari Beauty has successfully implemented this feature into their returns workflow. They can now automatically notify customers to keep certain returns, reducing the need for shipping and enhancing the overall customer experience.
Additionally, brands might consider implementing a disclaimer to ensure that only unused products are eligible for return. You can also leverage our Questions feature to assess the condition of the product, effectively reminding customers of your return policy.
Managing returns for beauty and fragrance products can be intricate, but with the right tools and strategies in place, this can make all the difference. Whether you’re just beginning or aiming to enhance your current system, our tips and insights can help you manage returns confidently and keep your customers satisfied.
