The top 12 best returns management software tools
Emma Dinning
·July 3, 2025
For ecommerce brands, delivering a superior returns experience is a crucial way to build customer trust and loyalty.
Up to 30 percent of all ecommerce product sales could end up in returns, and chances are, if the shopper is new to your brand, they’re not likely to come back. That means you’ll need to spend more on marketing expenses to acquire new customers for every one you lose, which can cost five to seven times as much as keeping the shoppers you have.
If you want to stop the bleeding, you need to put together a best-in-class returns management tech stack that optimizes for a positive customer experience at every turn – whether or not a shopper wants to keep the item they purchased. By relying on technology that delivers a great CX for your shoppers and optimizes for cost-efficiency, you’ll be able to build a streamlined and sustainable returns process that helps your brand retain more revenue and boost your customer loyalty rates.
Here are our recommendations for the must-have returns automation solutions to support a seamless returns management process:
Returns management operations
First up, you need a best-in-class platform that transforms your manual returns process into a streamlined, automated system. These returns management software tools can help you deliver a great customer experience while optimizing for revenue retention, provide opportunities to consolidate costs on reverse logistics, and offer advanced AI features to prevent fraud.
Loop
We don't just claim to be the best; we've earned the recognition to prove it. As the only returns and exchanges platform named a Shopify Premier Partner, we empower merchants who drive more than 15% of Shopify's total GMV. This gives us a wealth of data to build a returns experience that retains revenue and creates lifelong customers for your brand. And to top it all off, we integrate with 120+ solutions that uplevel your operations and CX (a few are listed below!).
But our commitment to your growth extends beyond returns. We are constantly innovating to solve the evolving challenges merchants face. From advanced fraud detection to a branded order tracking solution that drives repeat business and even a feature designed to offset operational costs, our suite of tools is built to support long-term, sustainable growth - for businesses just starting out to the enterprise. When new obstacles arise for our merchants, we deliver powerful, effective solutions.
Frate
Frate is another Shopify-focused ecommerce returns solution that focuses on helping you improve the sustainability of your returns process. By using optimization to determine the best course of action for every returned product, you’ll be able to identify the most profitable return path, whether that’s your warehouse, a reseller, or a recycling facility – helping you avoid wasted packaging and shipping costs.
While Frate’s feature set is more limited than Loop’s, it’s great at what it does, and it integrates well with many other leading providers, including Shopify POS, Gorgias, Happy Returns, and more.
Narvar
Narvar can be a great fit for enterprise-level merchants with custom needs and large budgets.
Narvar provides its retailers with a suite of features that enhance and optimize the post-purchase experience, including returns fraud detection, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and AI-powered delivery claim fraud protection. With a streamlined returns and exchange process that helps retailers retain more revenue, and dynamic routing that lowers the costs of reverse logistics, Narvar is a smart choice for retailers on ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Magento.
3PLs/Warehouse
Building an efficient returns process requires a fulfillment partner that can meet your brand’s needs, with access to multiple locations, state-of-the-art shipping solutions, and smart inventory management services. These three offer a versatile set of logistics solutions to keep your customers happy and your profit margins high.
ShipBob
ShipBob is an ideal fit for growing DTC brands. ShipBob integrates seamlessly with Shopify’s ecommerce platform, as well as other marketplaces including Amazon where you might list your products. Their simple pricing model starts at just $275 per month, and scales based on storage and fulfillment needs, so you’ll be able to pay for only what you’re using, and scale up from there.
With more than 60 fulfillment centers around the world, ShipBob is an ideal partner to help you get your orders to their destinations faster – and ensure that returns are optimized for maximum efficiency and cost-savings.
Ryder
Ryder offers sophisticated solutions for end-to-end logistics and fulfillment, with a huge distribution network throughout the United States. You can use their RyderShip ecommerce tool to get enhanced order processing and inventory management data, and take advantage of optimized storage and slotting technology to build efficiency into your processes.
Ryder integrates with Loop, Happy Returns, and several other returns management partners, giving you the ability to build streamlined returns workflows that fit your customers’ unique needs.
Radial
Radial is an ecommerce fulfillment partner that’s well-suited to the complex needs of enterprise brands, and it’s built to scale fast. In fact, merchants are able to launch on their fulfillment network in as little as a week. This provider is a great fit for merchants that sell their goods both DTC and wholesale, as Radial provides a streamlined platform that gives you visibility into all of your sales channels, and offers automated replenishment options to help you optimize your stock levels, avoiding overstocking or stockouts.
Radial also has an extensive network of last-mile delivery providers, making it ideal for merchants with bulky items that require specialized delivery services.
Customer Support
Providing an ideal customer experience during the returns process requires a sophisticated customer support platform that uses automation to help your CX team solve customer problems faster, and offers omnichannel support to help your team build a consistent and relevant experience throughout the customer journey.
Gorgias
Gorgias is a customer support platform that’s custom-built for ecommerce brands of any size, with deep Shopify integrations to facilitate a seamless experience. Using their AI agent, your CX team can resolve over 60% of customer support requests through automation, freeing up their time to focus on high-touch support needs. You can bring together all of your customer support channels, including voice, email, chat, social media, and in-app, into one unified dashboard view, enabling your team to quickly respond to issues and get full context on each customer’s interactions with your brand to deliver higher-quality service.
Gorgias’ app store includes integrations with 100+ ecommerce apps, making it easy to build a fully unified experience that includes all the tools you need to make your ecommerce shop successful.
Gladly
Gladly is a great fit for larger retail and ecommerce brands, geared for support teams with at least 10 agents. Gladly’s AI-powered customer support tool, Sidekick, uses conversational AI to answer customer questions and resolve issues quickly, and enables your support team to quickly get up to speed on each customer’s history with your brand across every channel to deliver higher-quality, personalized support. Gladly offers a range of out-of-the-box integrations, and also provides an App Platform that enables your development team to quickly build custom integrations.
For larger brands that want to build an AI-first customer experience that doesn’t cut corners on quality, Gladly is a solid choice to help you scale your support division.
Zendesk
As one of the largest and most comprehensive customer experience platforms on the market, Zendesk offers a diverse array of products to deliver efficient, personalized service on any channel, for every type of business. Zendesk's AI chatbot empowers support teams to resolve most issues instantaneously, ensuring that they can focus on those that require more expertise. You can easily publish content to your Knowledge Base, ensuring that customers can find the answers they need through self-service. Zendesk’s AI tools can also assess the quality of your CX agent’s customer interactions, helping you identify issues and provide training opportunities to ensure high quality across the board.
Zendesk offers integrations with over 1,500 other apps, providing the versatility to help you build a customized experience that meets your customers’ needs at every turn.
Shipping solutions
When it comes to reverse logistics tools, it’s important to find shipping solutions that can manage your returned products efficiently and cost-effectively, providing both your brand and your customers with confidence in the return shipping journey. These three solutions each offer key functionality to support a seamless reverse logistics process.
Happy Returns
Happy Returns gives you the tools to provide your customers with a hassle-free returns experience, enabling them to drop off their unboxed returns at any of their 8,000+ Return Bar® locations across the nation. This option helps you eliminate return fees for your shoppers and reduce them for your business, by consolidating returned products into affordable bulk shipments. Drop-off returns also help you protect against returns fraud, as each returned product is inspected before authorizing a refund.
By adding Happy Returns to your return shipping partner mix, you’ll be able to provide customers with enhanced convenience while protecting your brand’s profits.
EasyPost
EasyPost provides reliable shipping APIs that integrate with all the solutions you use to get your packages to Point A to Point B – whether you’re delivering a product or shipping a return.
By integrating with your returns management solution, EasyPost empowers your brand to easily create printable return shipping labels and QR codes for your customers, with pay-on-delivery to protect profits when customers decide not to make a planned return. EasyPost can provide your shop with discounted rates on major shipping carriers, including USPS, UPS, FedEx, and Canada Post, ensuring affordable and efficient reverse logistics services throughout North America.
With over 100 shipping integrations, EasyPost can help you make the return journey easier for both your customers and your brand.
Passport
When you’re engaging in cross-border commerce, you need a shipping partner that understands the ins and outs of international customs and declarations requirements. Passport’s shipping services include a wide variety of parcel shipping and compliance solutions, including support with customs & trade, fiscal & tax, and product compliance.
They’re great when it comes to the customer experience, too. Shoppers can get access to branded tracking pages to see the status of their orders, which can alleviate concerns when it comes to international shipments – both when shipping and returning products. When customers need to return a product, they can print out return mailing labels in the Passport Portal, or you can build a customized product return experience using integration partners like Loop.
By choosing a cross-border shipping partner that delivers a customized and compliant experience for all of your international markets, you’ll be able to spend less time on red tape and more time delighting your customers.
Choosing the right tools
It goes without saying that this list isn’t comprehensive – but, as an ecommerce tech vendor that supports over 5,000 ecommerce brands, they’re all choices that we stand behind and would happily recommend to our customers.
Not all of these solutions will be the right fit for your brand, and it’s important to do your research before making a choice. Start by assessing your pain points: Where are you struggling most in your returns management process? Do you need a single tool to help you, or would you benefit from an integrated tech stack that supports all of your use cases?
Look at each vendor’s features and integrations to help you identify solutions that will streamline your workflows and help you build a best-in-class returns experience for your customers. Take a look at their case studies to understand use cases and gauge potential ROI, look at customer testimonials on external reviews sites, and review analysts’ ratings. Then, book a demo and talk to someone on their team: By learning more about your brand and its current limitations, a representative may be able to offer more focused recommendations around how to put together a best-in-class returns management tech stack.
Ready to get started with building a better returns management system? Book a demo of Loop, and our team will walk you through the process from there.
In this article
Stay in the loop
Subscribe for product updates and Loop's biweekly newsletter.
See the savings your business could unlock
Retain more revenue with Loop today
With Loop, your brand can offer everything from refunds to direct exchanges to shopper incentives and more. Even better? These exchanges build your business.