Of course, growing is great, but with an increasing number of orders, you can have an increasing number of returns. Product returns increase the cost and complexity of your business, so it should always be a goal to try to reduce these to the minimum.
Let's analyze which brands, categories, or products are the ones affecting your return rate in our Most Returned Items report!
Definitions
The Most Returned Items report reveals your most returned items/brands/categories. Before you dive into data analysis, let's ensure that we are on the same page with some definitions.
Product Definitions
| SKU | Stock Keeping Unit, which is the unique ID associated with the product |
| Title | Name used to list the product |
| Product Title | Parent listing of the product variant |
| Brand | The associated brand of the product |
| Category | The associated category of the product |
Metric Definitions
| Items Returned | Number of returned items |
| Items Sold | Number of Gross Items Sold (before returns) |
| Product Return Rate | Percentage of returned items over gross items sold |
| Revenue Returned | Sum of Gross Revenue lost by product returns |
| Revenue | Sum of Gross Revenue generated by sells of this product |
| Revenue Return Rate | Percentage of Returned Revenue over total Gross Revenue |
Additionally, you can specify the following settings:
- Segment: choose if you want to see all customers represented in the numbers or only those belonging to a certain segment.
- Metric: choose if you want the bars to show the number of items returned or the sum of revenue returned.
- Time: month, day, quarter, half a year, year.
- Brand: show the returns of one brand within your store. If it is left blank, then it shows the performance of all brands together.
- Category: show the returns of one product category within your store. If it is left blank, then it shows the performance of all categories together.
In addition, you can analyze your Product Returns on a Variant, Product, Category, or Brand level.
Difference between Return and Refund
As the purchasing and return dates are different, returns are attributed to the date of purchase: if a certain day the Gross Revenue generated is $100, and a month later a return comes in for $20, then the Net Revenue generated in the day of the original purchase will be updated to $80.
The difference with the Refund is that Refunds are related to the cash-flow movement generated by Returns. This means that Refunds only impact the day the return takes place, and do not impact the day of the original purchase.
Use Cases
If you want to make sure that you spend your time and money on the most impactful items it is important that you are aware of the items most returned. The report answers the following questions:
- Which items are not meeting your customers' expectations and have high return rates?
- Which items lead to the highest revenue returned?
- Which items should you stop promoting in the future?
Returns are costly because they have to be reworked or are lost due to a defect. That's why it's important to track not only the number of returns over a period of time but also their reason to keep it as low as possible. The top reasons why customers return products are:
- Damaged products
- The product received looks different
- Bad quality
What You Need
For this report to work properly, the following data must be imported:
- Order ID
- Order Date
- Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)
- Items Sold
- Item Price
- Value Added Tax (VAT)
- Shipping Revenue
- Discounts
- Customer ID
- Product Returns
- Product Return Dates
- Product Title
- Variant Title
- Product Category
- Product Brand
How to Get More Details
The metrics are shown as a color-coded bar chart followed by absolute figures.
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