Which products come back — and why?

The return rate that finds the product with a fixable problem.

Returns feel like weather — something that happens to you. They are not spread evenly. A handful of your products come back far more often than the rest, usually for one reason that repeats, and that reason is usually fixable. A single overall return rate hides exactly the products you would want to look at.

What we do about it

• The return rate for every Amazon-fulfilled product, not the unit count — a product that sells more will always return more, and that tells you nothing.
• Each product is measured against its own group, so a category that naturally returns often does not drown out the one that suddenly changed.
• Amazon's return reasons are collapsed into a handful you can act on — wrong size, not as described, damaged, changed their mind — with the customer's own comment behind them.
• For products sold in several sizes, see which size is coming back. The fix is often one line in the size chart.

A real moment

One size in a range comes back three times as often as the others, and the reason is always the same: too small. Nothing is wrong with the product. The size chart is wrong. That is a copy edit, and it ends a stream of refunds, return shipping and re-listing costs that had been quietly accepted as the cost of doing business.

A composite scenario, drawn from patterns we see repeatedly — not a named customer's result.