Challenge with rising return costs

If the return cycle takes too long, the value of your products depreciates. This is especially impactful in the fashion industry, where seasons are short. If you don’t get items back fast, you’ll have to sell them at a discounted price. Each day that an item is not in stock, it loses on average 0,5% of its value, which means that every extra week an item is in the return process, it depreciates by 3,5%. With our decentralized network of warehouses, we’ll get returned products back to your central warehouse as fast as possible and in perfect condition since we can rework products and return them to a sellable state. Plus, since we have a large library of local carriers, it’s more convenient for your consumers to return unwanted items more quickly, speeding up the return cycle.

Since returns are the last touchpoint between your brand and consumers, it’s important to make the process customer-friendly. If the return experience leaves a bad taste in the mouths of your consumers, you might lose their business in part or for good. We make the return experience as seamless as possible by:

• Providing your consumers with a wide range of local carriers that they know and trust close to their locations
• Making return initiation easy with our online portal
• Providing fast refunds by registering and checking items locally in our decentralized network of warehouses
• Enabling transparent tracking of each returned parcel and communicating this information back to consumers

By ensuring a seamless return experience, we make sure that you maintain high customer loyalty and reduce the cost needed to acquire new customers. Learn more about improving the customer experience here.

If you provide refunds too slowly or consumers don’t know where their returned parcels are, they’re likely to launch a complaint through your customer service. Managing all of these inquiries and complaints requires significant time and investment from a customer service team. By keeping your consumers up-to-date with transparent tracking and emails about where their returned parcels are, we help significantly reduce the amount of customer service inquiries that your business has to handle. This reduces the back office workload and cost spent on maintaining a large customer service team.

Processing returns in your warehouses requires additional space and staff. To recover item value, it’s necessary to rework items and return them to a sellable state. This can take time away from processing incoming sales and outbound shipments. We have an entire global network of decentralized warehouses with rework capabilities, so we can rework your items and return them to you ready to immediately go back to stock. This reduces the amount of space allocated to returns within your warehouses and the amount of staff needed to process all of your returns.

Managing your carrier network is a time-consuming, full-time job. When you work with us, you get access to our entire carrier library which we manage ourselves. This means that you no longer need to manage it yourself, reducing the amount of back-office staff that you need to employ. We ensure that everything runs smoothly and that disruptions to the network are handled accordingly.

When you begin working with new carriers or other partners involved in the returns process, you need to integrate them with your internal systems. This can require significant IT investment. When you work with us, you get access to ReBound’s ecosystem of partners and carriers that are already integrated with our systems, which saves you time and money. 

Making sure that you’re on top of sustainability can require significant investment. At ReBound, we have a dedicated sustainability team who works tirelessly to improve the sustainability of our entire network. From packaging to transport, we are investing in new initiatives every day. Using our Network Sustainability Index, we assess the sustainability of each of our partners and ensure that they meet our high standards each year. By working with us, you can directly benefit from all of our efforts to make the returns process more environmentally friendly.