Too many returns?—Here are the best practices for dealing with returns in ecommerce...
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Too many returns?—Here are the best practices for dealing with returns in ecommerce...
In retail, image is everything. That’s why Seager Co takes great pride in running an ecommerce store that’s as clean and aesthetically pleasing as the trucker hats, tents, snapshirts and “Made in the USA” cowboy hats carried in their online catalog. But there’s nothing aesthetically pleasing about unbranded carrier tracking pages. Nor is there anything clean about a disjointed returns process that doesn’t allow customers to perform exchanges with ease. To combat these shortcomings, protect brand integrity, and give its customers a post-purchase experience worthy of the Seager name, co-founder, Case Anderson, decided to form a partnership with Narvar.
When Seager Co first opened its digital doors in 2015, it was and is the definition of a bootstrapped ecommerce startup:
But with time, the business and brand developed what can today be considered a cult-like following. By and large, their customers are a group of likeminded surfers, skaters, artists, hunters, and outdoorsmen—guys and gals who believe in the value of community, experiences, and the timelessness of high-quality outdoor gear.
Unfortunately, as Seager’s customer base and order volume surged skyward, so too did the complexities of meeting shopper expectations, particularly in the post-purchase experience. (This problem was especially acute in the area of returns and exchanges.)
“In the past, customers would contact us to initiate a return. Then they needed to pay for their shipping label and take their return to the post office,” explained Jacob Folsom, Customer Experience Lead at Seager.
“All the correspondence with the customer would be done over email—it was very manual and ineffective.”
In addition to wasting time and money, these inefficiencies made Seager’s legacy return process frustrating for customers and employees.
Rather than let their post-purchase experience keep floundering, Seager made the decision to build a robust partnership with the only end-to-end post-purchase platform that’s certified on Shopify Plus—Narvar.
“Customers trust our brand more when they don’t need to go to carrier sites to track their orders or returns…Narvar makes our business look more legitimate.”
Jacob Folsom, Customer Experience Lead at Seager
“I was actually shopping for shoes when I realized what Narvar could do for our business,” explained Seager Co-Founder, Case Anderson.
“The retailer I bought from sent me the wrong size and I needed to conduct an exchange—they used Narvar to handle the process and it was so easy, I was like ‘Holy s***, what have we been doing?!’ I just typed in my order number, picked the correct size, and I had the new shoes in three days—it was great.”
Using that seamless exchange experience as a jumping off point, Case reached out to Narvar to discuss the possibility of working together to improve the return and exchange experience for Seager.
“We’re seeing a 40-50% decrease in return-related inquiries.”
Case Anderson, Co-Founder at Seager
By offering its shoppers a seamless way to conduct exchanges, Seager is retaining more returns-related revenue than ever. In fact, they’re retaining approximately 43% of revenue from all products returned since launching with Narvar.
Part of the aforementioned success in revenue retention is tied to Seager’s creation and activation of intelligent returns rules within Narvar’s platform. From product tags to refund and return methods, Seager is giving shoppers a frictionless experience when it comes to conducting a return or exchange, which cements loyalty and preserves lifetime value.
“In addition to making things easier for our customers, many of our return rules help us save money,” explained Jacob.
“For example, depending on the product being returned or the shipping destination, we created a rule that processes some returns using USPS and some returns using UPS…whereas before, we just used one carrier for all our returns.”
“Narvar saves us so much time…The returns process is 1,000x easier now...I literally can’t imagine how we’d do returns without you guys.”
Jacob Folsom, Customer Experience Lead at Seager
Aside from their success with Narvar’s Return & Exchanges product, Seager is benefitting from the strategic deployment of Narvar Track too.
They are seeing a strong decrease in the number of “Where is my order?” inquiries (a roughly 20% decline) since implementing Track, and they’re seeing an uptick in engagement with their marketing assets. In just the first few months of 2023, they’ve seen a fantastic 10.1% engagement rate with their post-purchase marketing assets across more than 35,000 orders.
Going forward, Seager plans to build on its existing relationships with Narvar to not only take its order tracking and return experiences to the next level, but capture new sources of revenue, eliminate costly waste, and keep more earned revenue in-house.
"Roughly 70% of our business is currently online, which means Narvar is a huge asset and essential to what we do”
Case Anderson, Co-Founder at Seager
Founded in 2015, Seager Co embodies the grit and ruggedness of the American West in everything it does. Bootstrapped by its original owners and built with no venture capital or investors, Seager is rapidly expanding its customer base by translating its passion for community, experiences, and the outdoors into a catalog of high-quality, durable products. Like many D2C brands, Seager understands the importance of maintaining a strong connection to its customers both pre- and post-purchase. To that end, Seager uses Shopify in conjunction with several Narvar products (including Track and Return & Exchanges) to give their shoppers a post-purchase experience unlike any other.
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