The basic process that Return Rabbit follows is:
Your customer goes to your shopper portal and creates a return or exchange request (on their existing Shopify order).
Return Rabbit will issue a label for your customer if requested. Then, your customer ships the items back to you.
Once you have received the items, you perform an inspection on the items to ascertain their condition and whether they qualify for a return or exchange based on your policy. This step can also be automated based on shipping events.
You can choose whether to restock the received items in Shopify or not.
Once the above steps are completed, the return or exchange can be authorized from the admin interface. This step can also be automated.
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Once you authorize the return, a refund will be processed immediately. If your customer has returned multiple items, the refund will be processed as soon as all the individual items have been authorized. In case of an exchange, as soon as all the individual items are authorized, a new order will be placed in Shopify with the new items requested by your customer.
If your customer has to pay more for new items, a payment link will be sent to them and a post-payment exchange order will be placed. Until then, the order remains in Draft Order state.
Your customer receives their refund or exchange items, and the request is closed.
A few context-specific questions can arise during this flow:
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What if I don’t have a warehouse team? Or what if I trust my customers and want to approve the refunds/exchanges as soon as they drop off the item at the carrier location?
If you don’t have a warehouse, you can set up Return Rabbit so that - based on shipping events - the products coming back to you will be marked received and inspected and automatically sent to your customer success team for authorization. You can choose any event to trigger the warehouse skipping automation from the following:
As soon as the request is placed by your customer.
As soon as we receive the first scan event from the carrier.
As soon as we receive the delivered event from the carrier.
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What if I have a 3PL or a WMS system?
If you are using a 3PL or WMS system, we can integrate with their system to pass info to them as soon as a new request is placed by your customer. Once they have received the item, they can inspect it, and that info will be passed to ReturnRabbit via our integration. Return Rabbit will then do what is needed to process the request further (approve or reject, restock or not, as per warehouse decision).
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What if I want to skip manual approval once the products are cleared at the warehouse?
You can set the Return Rabbit system so that as soon as the products are deemed returnable by the warehouse inspection, the system approves the final refund or exchange. In case of multiple products being returned or exchanged, the refund process will happen only when all the products in an order service have been approved at the warehouse.
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What if I want to auto-approve products in a specific price range?
You can set the system up so that any orders within a specific price range skip approvals. These can be approvals at warehouse levels and/or admin levels.
The first step to an order service is its creation. It can be created by a customer or by one of your team members. Your customers can make a request by logging into your returns portal. If you wish to create a request on behalf of your customer, you can do so by following the Creating a Service Request flow.
Once a request is created, it goes through some states and statuses that require different levels of action from you.
Let's take a look at what happens to your order once your customer creates a service request. For this example, we will look through the processes involved and how your settings combine to give your customers an amazing post-purchase experience.
First, review the definitions of the terms we use:
Term |
Definition |
|---|---|
Order |
The order that your customer initially placed on your website to purchase the items they want to return or exchange. |
Service Request |
A return or exchange request made on one (or multiple quantities) of a single product purchased by your customer. If they purchased multiple items in an order, every item will have its own Service Request ID, even if they are creating a request for multiple items together. |
Order Service |
A collection of service requests made by the shopper in a single instance. |
You can, as a merchant, apply some automation to automatically receive and approve some requests so that your users can be instantly given refunds or faster exchanges.
First, let's look at the various states the service request can have:
Awaiting completion
(optional) Awaiting Qualification Approval
In Transit
Awaiting Warehouse Approval
Awaiting Admin Approval
An exception state is when an event or error drives a Service Request into an error state. If an Order Service has one or more service requests in an exception state, the Order Service cannot be fulfilled until the issue has been resolved. A request can enter into an exception state depending on a variety of factors that include:
No Inventory available for exchange item requested by customer (we use Shopify inventory as our source of truth for inventory)
Shopify Error
Manual Intervention (order was edited directly from Shopify before Return Rabbit tried to process a refund)
You can have two types of exception states: Locked Request and Request Marked for Rejection.
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Locked Request
A request can be locked either manually by an admin user or automatically by Return Rabbit.
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When a request is put on hold automatically by Return Rabbit, it's usually due to any of the following reasons:
Request was placed and the Original Payment Method (OPM) was selected as the refund method, but when the item was received at the warehouse, 60 days had passed so a refund cannot be issued on OPM due to Shopify restrictions.
One or more exchange items requested by the customer are not in stock, so the request is put on hold.
For any such requests, you can un-lock the request after resolving the issue and re-trying the approval.
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Request marked for Rejection
A request is marked for rejection when there is an error in processing from Shopify.
This state is irreversible, and any request that hits this state must be canceled from Return Rabbit.
In some cases, creating a new request in Return Rabbit and re-trying the requisite action might work, but we suggest our clients go to Shopify directly in such instances.