The Returns Self-Audit.
Tell your loyal high-returners from your serial abusers. A free field guide and worksheet to price returns customer by customer, on your own numbers. Runs in an afternoon, no access required.
The Returns Self-Audit
What’s inside
Why the rate can't answer this
Your best customers and your worst customers both return a lot. The four profiles, and why the blended rate hides all of them.
Fraud vs. abuse
Two problems with opposite owners. A checklist to sort criminal fraud from first-party policy abuse.
What a return actually costs
The full reverse-logistics stack, worked on an $80 apparel return, with a column to fill in your own.
Score net contribution
A five-step worksheet to price a customer after returns, plus keep rate, the bracketing signal the rate misses.
Segment the policy
Four segments, four moves. Why blanket return fees tax the loyal high-returners you most need to protect.
Read alongside
- Read
Insight · Patterns
Returns are a forward-value problem, not a shipping cost
- Read
Insight · Patterns
The returns-fraud number can't hold still
The term it turns on: Return propensity, in the glossary.
Your worksheet prices a few customers. The Diagnostic prices every one.
Doing this once in a spreadsheet is a good afternoon. The free Diagnostic scores every customer on Forward CLV after product costs and expected returns, in one read on one read-only Shopify connection, so the high-returners worth protecting stand apart from the ones costing you money.
Read-only access · No deck required · You keep the analysis either way