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      📚 How Return Rabbit Works

      The basic process that Return Rabbit follows to serve you and your shoppers is as follows:

      1. The shopper goes to your shopper portal and creates a return or exchange request (on their existing Shopify order).
      2. ReturnRabbit will issue a label for the shopper, if requested. The shopper ships back the items to you.
      3. Once you have received the items, you perform an inspection on the items to ascertain their conditions, and whether they qualify for a return or exchange based on your policy. This step can also be automated on the basis of shipping events.
      4. You can choose whether to restock the received items back to Shopify or not.
      5. Once the above steps are completed, the return or exchange can be authorised from admin interface. This step can also be automated
      6. Once you authorise the return, a refund will be processed immediately. If the shopper has returned multiple items, the refund will be processed as soon as all the individual items have been authorised. In case of an exchange, as soon as all the individual items are authorised, a new order will be placed on Shopify with the new items requested by Shopper.
        1. If shopper has to pay more money for new items, a payment link is sent to shopper and post payment, exchange order will be placed. Until then, order remains in Draft Order state.
      7. The shopper receives their refund or exchange items and the request is closed.

      Now, there can be a few context specific questions that arise during this flow.

      • What if I don’t have a warehouse team? Or what if I trust my shoppers and want to approve the refunds/exchanges as soon as they drop off the item at carrier location? If you don’t have a warehouse, you can set return rabbit up so that on the basis of shipping events, the products coming back to you can be marked received and inspected and are automatically sent to the shopper success team for authorisation. You can choose any event to trigger the warehouse skipping automation from the following:

        • As soon as the request is placed by the shopper.
        • As soon as we receive the first scan event from the carrier.
        • As soon as we receive the delivered event from the carrier.

      • 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 the shopper. Once they have received the item back, they can inspect the item and that info will be passed to ReturnRabbit via our integration and we will do the needful within ReturnRabbit to process the request further (approve or reject, restock or not, as per warehouse decision).

      • What if I want to skip manual approval once the products are cleared at the warehouse? You can set the return rabbit system in such a way 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.

      • 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.

      Now, let's take a detailed look at what happens to an order service.

      The first step to an order service is it's creation. It can be created by a shopper, or by one of your team members. The shoppers can make a request by logging in your returns portal. If you wish to create a request on behalf of the shopper, they can do so by following this flow:

      Creating a Service Request from Admin Portal

      Once a request gets 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 a service request has been created by the shopper. For this purpose, we will take a look through the processes involved and how your settings come together to give your shoppers an amazing post-purchase experience.

      To understand what we are talking about, let us see the definitions of some words so that there is no confusion moving forward.

      Order: Def:

      The order that your shopper has placed on your website the first time, to purchase the items they are willing to return or exchange.

      Service Request: Def:

      A service request is a return or exchange request made on one (or multiple quantities) of a single product purchased by the shopper. If they purchased multiple items in an order, every item will have it's own Service Request ID even if they are creating a request for multiple items in the same go.

      Order Service: Def:

      An order service is a collection of service requests made by the shopper in a single go.

      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.

      Here, we take a look at the various states the service request can have:

      💡 Exception states for a service request:

      An exception state is when an event or error drives a service request into an erroneous state. If an Order Service has one or more service request in an exception state, the Order Service can not 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 Shopper (we use Shopify inventory as our source of truth for inventory)
      • Shopify Error
      • Manual Intervention (order was edited directly from Shopify before ReturnRabbit tried to process refund)

      The different types of exception states are:

      1. Locked Request:
        1. A request can be locked either manually by an admin user or automatically by ReturnRabbit
        2. When a request is put on hold automatically by ReturnRabbit, it's usually due to any of the following reasons:
          1. Request was placed and Original Payment Method (OPM) was selected as refund method but when item was received at warehouse, 60 days had surpassed and so refund can now not be issued on OPM due to Shopify Restrictions.
          2. One or more exchange items requested by the shopper is not in stock, and hence the request is put on hold.
          3. For any such requests, you can un-lock the request after resolving the issue and re-try the approval.
      2. Request marked for Rejection:
        1. A request is marked for rejection when there is an error in processing from Shopify.
        2. This state is irreversible and any request which hits this state, will have to be cancelled from ReturnRabbit.
        3. In some cases, creating a new request on ReturnRabbit and re-trying the requisite action might work but we suggest our clients to do the needful from Shopify directly in such instances.

      Flowchart for processing an order service: