The Challenge: Recapturing revenue lost from returns

While the DUER team delighted its customers during the initial customer journey, things fell apart during the post-purchase experience when customers needed to return items. Before implementing Loop, all returns were handled manually.

“It was such a manual process. We didn’t have any data in terms of what product was being returned and for what reason, so there was no product feedback loop,” says Roex. “We were just sending out prepaid return labels for our customer, and then they would send it back.”

Adding to their challenges, DUER only had a warehouse in Canada, so their customers based in the U.S. would need to ship their returns there through a third-party consolidator—which meant that customers could be waiting 30 days for confirmation that their return had been processed. It was an expensive process for DUER, and a clunky one for their customers.

Because there was no way for DUER to process an exchange—they’d have to issue a full refund, then ask the customer to make a brand new order—DUER was losing money on nearly every return. The difficult returns process put a strain on the company’s lone customer support agent, and led to frustrating experiences for their customers. Worse, more often than not, DUER was in the dark about why customers were making returns, eliminating any opportunity to improve the shopping experience.

Insights helped DUER improve shopper experience

Every month, the ecommerce team exports the data from Loop to analyze trends in returns and the reasons their customers share for why they’re returning a certain item.

“We’re able to identify sizes that are out of tolerance, or something that is fitting a bit tighter than usual, much faster than we ever were before,” says Roex. They can use those insights to update the product page with recommendations to size up on a specific product, for example.

“Loop gives our product team full visibility into why individuals are returning products. That feedback loop is so great.”

And with these customer return insights, DUER worked with their Shopify Plus Design and Development agency partner iamota to create and launch a new site redesign.

A key focus of the redesign was to help shoppers understand DUER’s styles and fits as a means to guide their shopping journey. Knowing everyone’s shopping journey is different, iamota worked with DUER to realign first on the customer messaging that’s delivered on the site about styles and fits.

“It’s common for brands to use ‘internal terminology messaging on their storefront that the brand team understands. Which makes sense because they live and breathe that messaging every day as they build the brand. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that first time shoppers of the brand will understand that messaging as well,” says Siobhan Carr, Strategy Manager at iamota.

Not only does progressively educating the shopper with your messaging provide a better customer experience, but it also provides an opportunity for DUER to build rapport with shoppers. To do this, DUER and iamota focused on recreating the navigation, collection page, PDP, and a detailed fit guide.

The Outcome: Better shopper experience, and less revenue lost

Moving from a manual returns process to Loop’s exchange-first automated returns management platform has enabled the DUER team to do more with less, much like their products do for their customers.

Loop facilitates seamless returns and exchanges, making it easy to transform returns into exchanges—and even incentivizes upsells to gain more revenue in the process. Loop’s self-service platform effortlessly recaptures revenue with no work involved from the DUER team.

“Loop feels so hands-off, and is able to run and execute in the back end,” says Roex. “It’s the strongest UX experience for a customer I’ve seen.”