The Real Costs of Product Returns

Online shopping has become the new worldwide standard, offering a convenient way for customers to get what they need from the comfort of their own homes. However, it has also bred unprecedented challenges, including the beast of online returns. But with content optimization, Virtucom Group can help you implement an effective ecommerce strategy to minimize your returns and maximize your gains. Here, we explain how we can optimize your content to ensure customers are buying what they’re looking for – all while helping you rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

Online Returns: The Unfortunate Reality

If an influx of product returns happens over time or all at once, like after the holidays, it can cause astronomical damages for retailers. Specifically, they can take a toll on each of the following elements of your ecommerce and in-store channels:

1. Company Spending: If you want to attract shoppers, then you need a return policy that caters to their desires. But in many cases, this can mean offering free return shipping until a certain designated period. As a result, retailers spend billions each year on sales returns – in 2020 alone, the average retailer lost $106 million in returns for every $1 billion in revenue.
2. Profits: What can retailers do with returned products? Oftentimes, it’s simply destroyed according to their protocol, meaning double the loss for your business and double the environmental impact.
3. Brand Loyalty: When a customer makes a return because they are dissatisfied with your product, their trust in your brand can tank. In turn, this can result in less web traffic and fewer sales for your business.

A Quick, Effective Fix

A lot of the time, items that are purchased online are returned because they are damaged or broken. However, SaleCycle reported that 64.2% of shoppers make their returns because the item they received doesn’t match its description. At Virtucom Group, our product data and content specialists can target this issue and eliminate it from your website altogether.

When you extend your team with our experts, we’ll first gather accurate product data through a blend of research, vendor communication, and product data sheet analyses. Then, our product content specialists will weave this information throughout their writing, crafting copy that is engaging enough to captivate readers and natural enough to rank better on Google.

With more than 15 years of experience under our belt, you can trust the Virtucom Group team to enhance your website. To find out how we can reduce returns, increase conversions, and make you into a brand your customers can trust, contact us today.