When you start an e-commerce business returns are not on top of your agenda. The same is true for us when we started our DTC startup WIESEMANN 1893.

I realized the impact of the problem for the first time when I was standing in front of several pallets of perfectly working products with damaged packaging. Setting up a process of checking the products, refurbishing them and repackaging is not profitable. Selling them as used products bears the risks of merchants reselling them and liability issues.

Why we need more transparency

First of all we decided to get our data right and monitor them on a monthly basis. Our three KPIs are return rate, not sellable rate and waste rate (details below). We will publish our statistics now on a monthly basis on our company LinkedIn profile and our homepage for two reasons. We want to put some pressure on ourselves to improve our numbers from month to month. In addition, the topic around return rates seems to be a huge taboo that no one wants to talk about or make it a big secret. I think more transparency around this issue will help to give customers a better understanding for their own behaviour and might kick off a discussion on tactics and ideas to improve the rates for every brand and industry professional.

What we are publishing

At the beginning of each month we will publish the different rates for the previous months. This is the example for September:

What our numbers mean exactly

1. Return Rate

Our return rate is the percentage of products that are sent back by customers. We try to reduce the rate by giving as many information (image, technical data, info graphics) as possible. Especially our products with good video content show lower return rates.

2. Not Sellable Rate

Returns are only sent out to customers again if they are still “new”. New in this case means the products have not been used and the packaging is not damaged. All products that are not considered “new” are not sellable for us anymore. We try to decrease the rate of not sellable products by improving our packaging. We aim to convert all products to reclosable packaging by end of 2020.

3.Waste Rate

Our waste rate is the number of products that are disposed at the end of the month. Here we talk about tools that are not usable anymore and really damaged after being sent back.

Reducing the Waste Rate

From an economic and environmental point of view our main goal is to reduce the waste rate. Therefore, we need to find economic viable ways to use our not sellable products. We are currently preparing our project Returns for Good which I will explain in an article in the next weeks. Basically, we are donating the returns to charities that need them like workshops, bike repair shops etc.

//As most of our products are standardized we have a naturally lower return rate than most other product categories. Therefore it is probably easier for us to publish our return rate. Nevertheless we are happy to get some tips and hacks on how you reduce returns and waste.