Turning Returns into Revenue: Strategies for Exchanges and Better Customer Experiences

[00:00:00] Jordan Bleak: You should make returns available to shoppers, and again, [you] want to optimize for [the] long term, right? And so, if that’s your goal as a brand—optimize for [the] long term and LTV—then, you should make that experience as available as possible, right? And think about it as part of the experience rather than, “I want to avoid [it] at all costs.”

[00:00:21] Glenn Gooding: Welcome to Parcel Perspectives, the podcast dedicated to small parcel shippers. I’m Glenn Gooding. In each episode, we dive into insights, best practices, and strategies to help you navigate this complex and costly market.

[00:00:35] Glenn Gooding: Hello, everyone! Thanks for joining me for another episode of Parcel Perspectives. This is Glenn Gooding. [I] have an exciting—I find it exciting—topic to discuss with you and my guest—I’ll introduce him in just a moment—the ugly term called “returns.” We’re going to take a glass-half-full approach this time, and we’re going to find out—can you approach a returns program as an opportunity rather than a cost?

[00:01:03] Glenn Gooding: So, without further ado, joining me today is Jordan Bleak, General Manager of Returns and Head of Post-Sales at Redo. Jordan spends his days helping brands turn what most see as a headache—returns, that is—into an opportunity. At Redo, he focu ses on strategies that make exchanges easier, improve operations, and create a better customer experience.

[00:01:29] Glenn Gooding: Jordan, thanks for being here. I’m excited to dive into this with you.

[00:01:34] Jordan Bleak: Looking forward to it.

[00:01:35] Glenn Gooding: Great. So, if you don’t mind, for our listeners—do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and what in the world led you to this niche area called “returns”?

[00:01:46] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, yeah, I would love to. It’s actually—it is just an interesting path. It’s not super intentional, to be honest, but I’ve fallen in love with it now. I’m a Utah native, so [I] grew up in a place called Bountiful, Utah—a lot of tech [is] around here. And so, growing up for me, I actually was really into sports and competing and played basketball, football, baseball, soccer—everything.

[00:02:13] Jordan Bleak: Loved basketball and actually got [to] play with some very good people. Three of our starting five in high school ended up playing professionally—

[00:02:21] Glenn Gooding: Wow.

[00:02:21] Jordan Bleak: — and so it was just fun. I got [to] compete growing up, and professionally. I share that just because it’s actually influenced a lot of my decision-making in my career.

[00:02:32] Jordan Bleak: I studied finance at BYU, and during that time, had an internship offer that said, “Hey, let us know within 24 hours if you want to accept this.” And it just felt super rushed. And so, I knew someone working at a startup called Divvy here locally. At the time, no one had ever heard of the name or anything, but I went in and sat down with the co-founder or founder—sorry—Blake Murray, and he got on the whiteboard [and] drew everything up about the company.

[00:03:05] Jordan Bleak: I understood zero of it, but it was the first time that I’d felt like there was someone that I could almost go compete with—almost like sports again. So, that’s what really drew me. I ended up—I didn’t even know what I signed up for. It was literally just, “Hey, just come work here,” and [I] came and worked, ended up doing a lot with post-sales, upselling, and a lot of [it was] just on the revenue front at Divvy. The company ended up going from—really, when I started, it was [a] sub-million run rate—ended up selling three and a half years later for 2.5 billion dollars, and [it] has continued growing. 

[00:03:39] Jordan Bleak: About a year after the acquisition, honestly, I just loved startups, loved competing, and found Redo. Redo actually had a lot of similarities to Divvy—just Divvy was a software product, solving a very big pain point that was actually free or monetized in a free way and sold to SMB companies. And Redo, it actually started very similarly—a really big pain point with returns that was monetized in a unique way that was free to SMB companies, and this time in eCommerce specifically.

[00:04:19] Jordan Bleak: So, that’s actually what originally drew me. And so, me and a few others from Divvy ended up kind of looking into this, seeing a lot of the similarities, and thought, “This is actually a great opportunity.” So, that’s what led me to eCommerce, and since then, I have just fallen in love with the world of eComm.

[00:04:34] Jordan Bleak: And working with brands is just one of the best things about the U.S. and what I love about entrepreneurship—seeing that all play out in eComm. And returns was the big pain point, so that’s how I got here.

[00:04:47] Glenn Gooding: You bet it is. Boy, you’re athletic, you’re competitive, and you’re smart. Finance degree at BYU—good.

[00:04:54] Jordan Bleak: It’s a lot of fun. I’ve been blessed to get to learn from a lot of great people along the way.

[00:04:59] Glenn Gooding: Great. Let’s dive in, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Why do most eCommerce brands still view returns as a cost rather than an opportunity? That’s the obvious question.

[00:05:10] Jordan Bleak: The honest answer is just that it’s painful. It’s a cost center in a lot of ways. It’s expensive—eComm brands have paid for ads to get customers to buy, paid for the free shipping, and now, they’re getting hit with the refund where they’re not actually actualizing anything that they paid for. And so, it makes a lot of sense why that happens. You’re also—there’s a bunch of hidden costs in there, too.

[00:05:34] Jordan Bleak: You’re also paying for the employment to get the item back, to unpackage it, inspect it, [and] get it back ready to sell. And just that whole process is pretty painful. So, you can see where the negative sentiment comes into play for brands.

[00:05:49] Glenn Gooding: I certainly can. A lot of cost—heck, a lot of shrinkage, right? There’s a lot of product [that] comes back [that] you can’t resell, right?

[00:05:57] Jordan Bleak: Totally.

[00:05:58] Glenn Gooding: So, it is a big deal. What would you say are some of the biggest operational and customer experience challenges that businesses are facing today when managing returns?

[00:06:10] Jordan Bleak: Yeah. I really think about the challenges in kind of two buckets. One is the physical, operational challenges—

[00:06:18] Glenn Gooding: Okay.

[00:06:19] Jordan Bleak: —and then, I’ll call them technical challenges.

[00:06:21] Jordan Bleak: In terms of the operational challenges, those are actually the easiest to understand that brands think about, and it is what we just talked about: getting items back efficiently—are they ready to sell again, or can you get them back ready to sell or not?

[00:06:34] Jordan Bleak: Restocking—the work to get it back into inventory—and all those systems, making those all work—obviously [a] painful challenge. Some of the ones that brands overlook often are what I call those technology challenges.

[00:06:51] Glenn Gooding: Okay.

[00:06:51] Jordan Bleak: And it actually starts in the purchase experience. So, even before people are making returns, there’s a pain point and the challenge of—is your policy meeting the expectations of your customer base? And just with Amazon and what they’ve done in the world—which is speed—and if you can get a return on anything, for any reason, at any time, there’s just a new expectation that consumers have for what a brand should offer on the returns front.

[00:07:21] Jordan Bleak: And so, brands—does your policy match those expectations? In a lot of ways, are you advertising your policy in the right way to de-risk the purchase with the shopper?

[00:07:33] Jordan Bleak: Anyway, Redo actually started with this whole coverage model where you actually offer a free return at checkout. It says, “Hey, pay a little more; you get a free return on the back end.” And that was how we monetized and could offer this for free. We’ve since branched out into a lot of other things with it, but that was actually the initial place we started—which was actually in the shopper journey of purchasing.

[00:07:55] Jordan Bleak: Some of the other technology challenges are now on the back end with the actual return process, where brands that don’t have a system to manage returns there’s email that’s just back and forth, and you don’t really know why. They just say, “Hey, I want to return this.” “Great, here’s your label.” And you’re missing out on so many key details about why—on a critical part of the customer journey.

[00:08:18] Jordan Bleak: Some others are exchange rate—so, people aren’t optimized for exchanges. I’m sure I’ll chat about that. I’m just really passionate about driving exchange rate for brands. There’s data that you’re missing—if there is a bad experience, they’re not coming back. And then even fraud. So, those are all some of the challenges that we hear from brands.

[00:08:39] Glenn Gooding: So, tell me if I’m off base here. I’m going to take a layman’s perspective on returns categorically. One bucket would be what I view as the product didn’t fit, it didn’t meet expectations, [or was the] wrong item—something like that, right? Where the buyer is dissatisfied with what they received for some reason.

[00:09:00] Glenn Gooding: The second—and this is where I get to pick on my wife a little bit, okay? I’ll give you an example. If I buy a pair of shoes online, [there’s a] real good chance I buy one pair of shoes. I know what size I wear. I get it, [and] I’m good to go. My wife, on the other hand, if she buys a pair of shoes, she’s going to buy three pairs of them in three different sizes to ensure she has the one that feels the best, and she’s going to return the other two.

[00:09:28] Glenn Gooding: So, it’s really not dissatisfaction—it’s an over-purchase, if you will. First off, am I off base with those categorical assumptions?

[00:09:38] Jordan Bleak: Oh, you can for sure see it, right? If you know it’s the exact same item, just different sizes, you know they’re bracketing. And so, there’s actually a couple of interesting learnings that we’ve had related to bracketers.

[00:09:53] Jordan Bleak: And in some ways, if you think—again, if you think about the economics of a brand—you know a return is coming back on that purchase. And so, there are actually some interesting things that you can or should do. One is, could you, at checkout on the confirmation page when that happens, actually say, “Hey, do you want to just get one of these? This is most likely your size.” Have some of those sizing charts to help them, or say, “Hey, take a discount if you only want one.” 

[00:10:16] Jordan Bleak: One of the other things that we’ve learned is, if you already know that you are going to be paying for a return label to send things back, add as much into that order as you can. So, one-click upsell later on the [timeline]—it doesn’t cost you any more to add some other smaller items to that order.

[00:10:37] Jordan Bleak: If you already know you’re going to be repackaging something on the other end, add more. [It’s] kind of a different concept than I think brands typically think about when they’re dealing with bracketers, but [it] can be an effective strategy to try to increase AOV and get a little more lifetime value out of those purchases.

[00:10:54] Glenn Gooding: Now, let’s talk about lifetime value for a minute. I would think there’s a direct correlation between handling the first category I laid out there—a dissatisfied buyer, meaning for some reason the product didn’t meet expectations, didn’t fit something, right? That seems to be the sweet spot for going the extra mile to try to delight that customer and keep them as a return client. Is that right?

[00:11:21] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, yeah. I think it is also possible with the second category too. If you can convert those two purchases into one size and a little bit about the shopper, you can actually give some recommendations for other products that aren’t just a variant exchange between the big and the small or whatever that is. That can go a long way. 

[00:11:42] Jordan Bleak: With exchanges, we’ve run several studies on this, and there have been other studies in the market done on this. Exchanges are so good for brands. And because there’s still a little bit of operational headache with it, they’re not cheap per se, right? Because you’re still going through some of those expenses—paying employees and restocking, that sort of thing.

[00:12:05] Jordan Bleak: But if you look at the LTV, like you mentioned, of shoppers who have made an exchange versus all other shoppers—whether or not they made a return—it’s actually two to three times higher for those that made exchanges. And so—yeah, go ahead, Glenn.

[00:12:24] Glenn Gooding: No, that’s assuming it was an exchange or return experience, right?

[00:12:29] Jordan Bleak: Yeah. And there are times that people make an exchange [and it] still doesn’t work, and then they get the refund. But usually, if the customer wanted that thing originally and if they’re going to stick around as a valuable customer long term, exchanges are your best shot at getting to that point. And there are a lot of shoppers who do get to that point.

[00:12:48] Jordan Bleak: So, my background is in post-sales. There’s an interesting thing with onboarding companies to a new technology, and I call it the “trough of disillusionment.” I read that somewhere; I didn’t coin that term. But what it is, is people get really excited about buying a new technology, new software. Then they get into implementation, and there are pain points.

[00:13:10] Jordan Bleak: It’s a little hard—there’s change management with employees—and it’s actually pretty painful. You go through this called “trough of disillusionment.” But what I’ve learned is, if you can get to the other side of that hump, and then, they start seeing the benefits and what they wanted out of that software, they are so much stickier than if they didn’t go through that trough of disillusionment.

[00:13:32] Jordan Bleak: And [they] love the team, love your software even more than they would if everything was just smooth sailing. And I actually don’t think it’s different between a technology brand or technology company and these eCommerce brands, where if you get to that other side of the trough of disillusionment with a shopper, they’re sticky and they’re happier than even if they hadn’t.

[00:13:56] Glenn Gooding: Okay, okay. So, interesting—I’m going to dive into that a little bit here. What do you see as broken in today’s traditional returns process—bad or status quo versus best in class?

[00:14:15] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, there are a couple of misses, I think, in the market with return providers today. The first is really that we treat shoppers like a one-size-fits-all, and it’s actually fascinating. Just think about what’s happening with AI. A lot of what’s going on. I know some startups that are literally trying to create websites or themes that are different for everyone that’s coming to the website, based on who they know or what they can understand about that shopper.

[00:14:44] Jordan Bleak: And so, there’s this theme of personalization that is happening, and it’s no different in the returns experience. If you think about it, the return experience should be personalized to an individual. And the returns today—and what’s broken with it—is that it’s a one-size-fits-all. You have a policy. Your policy is there to protect you as a brand from abuse—from people taking advantage of your goodness. But if you think about it, a lot of times that policy is actually saying, “Hey, a first-time shopper is getting rejected in the return experience, even though they’re only three days past the return window,” for example.

[00:15:23] Jordan Bleak: We see this happen. You should do everything possible to let that return through. Now, you should tell them and say, “Hey, you’re actually past the return window, but let’s go ahead and let you through to get an exchange or to get store credit,” right?

[00:15:36] Jordan Bleak: And you still don’t give the refund, but now they’re almost like grateful, “Oh, thanks for still letting me do something to interact with your brand again.” And that’s not happening in the market today. And there are a lot of examples of that. But if you think of brackets—that’s a different profile. Those should be treated differently in the experience. You shouldn’t really be giving bonuses maybe for exchanges, where some brands do that today. But a lot of times, if you’re using bonuses for incentivizing exchanges, sometimes you’re going to be giving it out when they’re going to make an exchange anyway—or you’re giving it to people who are just repeat abusers of your return policy.

[00:16:15] Glenn Gooding: I could even see a bracketer actually deliberately bracketing solely to abuse a subsidized shipping program. “Free shipping on all orders over a hundred dollars.” So, you deliberately bracket to exceed that threshold, knowing you’re going to return the other items later and be off the hook.

[00:16:33] Jordan Bleak: That’s a great example.

[00:16:35] Jordan Bleak: And so, one of the things that we facilitate at Redo is—you should essentially recapture that shipping fee and apply a fee. But you don’t want to apply that fee also to your first-time shoppers or to some of the good groups. You think about—I don’t know if it’s good or bad per se—sometimes there’s bad with bracket[ing], sometimes not.

[00:16:54] Jordan Bleak: But anyway, that’s a personalized experience. That’s a great example, Glenn.

[00:17:00] Glenn Gooding: And, maybe I’m old school, but I kind of view that as a version of fraud, to be frank, because the buyer is trying to circumvent the goodwill of the brand or the policy of the brand. What about some of the other more blatantly fraudulent activities that really are pervasive in the returns environment?

[00:17:20] Jordan Bleak: Yeah. Yep. It is interesting. There’s—we’ll call it return fraud. It’s both like claims—so, it even happens with lost or damaged packages.

[00:17:28] Glenn Gooding: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:29] Jordan Bleak: That can be fraudulent. Sometimes there’s return fake tracking ID fraud—so, FTID fraud. That is kind of hard to pin down. It’s been fascinating learning about that space and realizing that, wow, people are literally editing labels in Adobe Acrobat and shipping them to different addresses and circumventing some of the systems.

[00:17:49] Jordan Bleak: And so, doing that, it really is important to have a provider that has access to some of the data—to find some of those addresses, some of the shoppers, some of those credit cards, those emails, and that sort of thing. We’ve actually partnered with a company that specialized in this—so, shoutout to Yofi. It’s the name of the company—they were actually just acquired this week; they announced it. They’ve been great partners in trying to track that down for brands and flag those.

[00:18:15] Glenn Gooding: Great, so, we’ll go back up. You talked about exchanges for a minute and kind of encouraging them. What are some other—maybe you gave a couple examples I think—trying to encourage an exchange over a return type of scenario. Are there any other best practices or strategies that brands can implement to encourage exchanges over refunds?

[00:18:36] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, we’ve already talked about bonuses.

[00:18:38] Glenn Gooding: Yep.

[00:18:38] Jordan Bleak: The other two things that I’d hit on are A/B testing. If you think about the marketing function of a company, they are testing everything about the website—and then, a lot of times, with ads too.

[00:18:52] Jordan Bleak: A lot of A/B testing on wording, on who you’re targeting, different groups—and that’s all happening. You’re literally testing the color of buttons and A/B testing that. The returns experience doesn’t get any love, and so there’s very limited A/B testing. That’s something that we’ve built at Redo to help with—that is, actually A/B testing the types of questions that you’re asking in the return experience, A/B testing some of the visuals—

[00:19:17] Glenn Gooding: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:18] Jordan Bleak: —and that’s something underrated that brands should be doing.

[00:19:21] Jordan Bleak: The second—and again, this is a little specific to Redo—I actually don’t know really anyone out there working on it or approaching it in the same way, but it’s actually using AI. And so, we’ve talked about Redo returns a lot.

[00:19:34] Jordan Bleak: Redo actually has a lot of different products. We have order tracking, we have an OMS, we have shipping optimization—there are actually a bunch of different products that we do. And the reason we’ve approached that strategy is because we believe that there are these touchpoints in the customer journey that are really critical to actually understanding what’s going on with the customer. Those touchpoints don’t really exist in the market, and that actually affects how you can personalize the returns experience [and] optimize for exchanges.

[00:20:04] Jordan Bleak: And so, understanding that shopper and understanding your product catalog—so, we’ll take into account the product descriptions, but even beyond that, with AI, actually, associations of products. We’ve been doing some interesting things with associations—saying, “This product is actually like these products. The shopper wanted this; it didn’t work. These are similar products that are actually unique compared to this one in this way.”

[00:20:31] Jordan Bleak: Knowing and understanding that, and having the data, then actually allows you to go and offer an opinionated recommendation that’s actually right [for the] shopper. So, those are some of the things that we’ve worked on with a few brands that have been very effective.

[00:20:47] Glenn Gooding: Very cool. So, one would naturally assume you encourage an exchange over a refund—that has a massive financial impact to the brand. Do you have an anecdotal kind of example of really what it might do to CLV, as an example?

[00:21:07] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. If you’re looking at customer lifetime value, it’s actually a little harder to track down, and so you do need to have a returns provider that runs that analysis—typically just because it’s hard to track down. There’s a lot of data.

[00:21:21] Jordan Bleak: And yeah, we have done that, and there’s a lot more data science, honestly, that we want to dive into to kind of surface that for brands proactively than we’re doing today. So, that’s something we’re focused on. One of the things that we have done more tests on are some of those A/B tests.

[00:21:37] Jordan Bleak: And so, a couple of tangible examples to think about is we’ve worked with a brand that sold bags, and they wanted to reduce their return rate. Getting into the details with them, we realized that one style of bag was a smaller version [of] another style.

[00:21:57] Jordan Bleak: And so, as they were going through it, we A/B tested and said, “Hey, if they’re returning the bigger bag because it’s too big, we are actually opinionated and say, ‘Hey, this style is a smaller version. Do you want to try it out?’” And that one small change ended up increasing their exchange rate by 30%.

[00:22:15] Glenn Gooding: Wow.

[00:22:16] Jordan Bleak: And then, two examples this week—so, we’re doing this across all brands. A brand was using a returns provider; their exchange rate was 12.5%. We tweaked a couple of things for them—it’s actually 31% with Redo so far.

[00:22:31] Jordan Bleak: And another brand that sells suits—and suits are hard to get right on sizing.

[00:22:38] Glenn Gooding: Yeah, I might be a bracketer on that front.

[00:22:39] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, yeah, exactly right—me too. And that’s a big pain point. Their return rate, if you include exchanges, is actually incredibly high for that reason. But switching to Redo and some of the AI features we’ve added—we actually have AI in a lot of places in their flow—and their exchange rate has increased from 42% to 63%, which for them ended up being nearly a million dollars a year in savings for them. So, it’s a big deal.

[00:23:11] Glenn Gooding: Do you have any other user case examples of how brands using Redo have successfully transformed returns into revenue opportunities?

[00:23:20] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, a couple others come to mind. There’s a T-shirt brand—nothing crazy to think about or complex with T-shirts—but we actually changed a little bit about their flow that looks at the intent first, and then treats customers differently after we understand their intent.

[00:23:37] Jordan Bleak: And what I mean by that is, they might already be intending to exchange, and so, in the flow we just say, “Hey, what do you want—exchange, store credit, or refund?” And when they choose “exchange,” we make that as easy as possible to get through and make the exchange.

[00:23:52] Jordan Bleak: If they choose “refund,” then what we did is actually offer a bonus—but instead of just displaying a bonus like a lot of return providers do, we kind of dug in and said, “Let’s actually be opinionated about this and say, ‘Hey, do you want to take an extra X to get an exchange?’” That ended up increasing by about a 40% relative increase—still a big impact for that brand.

[00:24:15] Glenn Gooding: Awesome, awesome. What operational efficiencies come with reframing returns as part of the customer journey?

[00:24:23] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, the most obvious one is in the customer support function. Thinking about all the questions that come about returns—it’s actually usually a big percentage of a brand’s support tickets. Now, it depends on the brand, of course, and what you sell. But for those that have a lot of returns, it’s a high percentage of ticket volume. And these can be things like, “What’s your policy?” or “Do you offer free returns?” Some of what Redo does, pre-purchase can help with that, but even after a return is submitted, you get questions where shoppers change their mind.

[00:24:55] Jordan Bleak: They say, “Hey, I actually wanted a refund. Let me actually keep this item.” We do see that happen. There are sometimes questions about that. There are a lot of questions about return tracking—“Where in the process is my return?” And so, some brands—especially if you haven’t had a returns provider and are looking into one, we’ve seen brands experience a 15–20% reduction in ticket volume just from optimizing that experience, which obviously saves costs and frees up some of your employees to work on things in the warehouse or more important projects.

[00:25:28] Glenn Gooding: Okay, so, curious—self-fulfillment versus outsourcing to a 3PL. Does that change the lens or how you manage the returns process as a brand?

[00:25:42] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, I’m actually curious about your perspective on this, Glenn—you’re the expert here. But from my perspective, it can, certainly—just because you’re thinking about those costs and what it takes.

[00:25:57] Jordan Bleak: And again, it’s hard as a brand to take the time to really dive into that and do the calculation of how much [it’s] costing to manage these myself—especially with employee labor, right? Breaking that out into just returns. And that’s a pretty hard thing to do. And especially at certain scales, you’re not even going to think about that until later on.

[00:26:21] Jordan Bleak: There certainly becomes a way where outsourcing that is a big help—just for less split focus of the team if cost and focus are divided, and that sort of thing. But I’m actually curious if you have opinions on that, Glenn.

[00:26:32] Glenn Gooding: Oh, I certainly do. I certainly do. I think the operative [phrase] “a qualified or a good 3PL” can greatly enhance efficiency.

[00:26:41] Glenn Gooding: So, just think about headcount—you have efficiencies of scale, right? Economies of scale with regard to dedicated staff already performing pick, pack, ship, and receiving things. And so, folding returns into that is just incremental work into an existing employee base already, versus self-fulfilling and your own standalone process.

[00:27:06] Glenn Gooding: The other thing that really stands out to me from a 3PL perspective—or a good 3PL—is that they can bring many different types of return solutions to bear for the brand, contingent on what kind of client experience they want.

[00:27:21] Glenn Gooding: So, for example, in my opinion, the easiest consumer-friendly return that there is—if you don’t want to get in a car and drive—is a postal return. And if you’re a brand direct or if you’re a self-fulfilled brand, you don’t necessarily have a postal solution there that’s economical, right?

[00:27:46] Glenn Gooding: You go a step [further]—obviously, you’ve got UPS Stores, you’ve got FedEx offices, you’ve got Amazon-type returns that can be done at a UPS Store or those types of things as well. So, it gives many other options on the board for a brand.

[00:28:01] Glenn Gooding: And then, of course, I think 3PLs can put some really slick things together with regard to evaluating—[training] to evaluate the product, restock it appropriately, minimize shrinkage—things like that can be really good.

[00:28:13] Jordan Bleak: Yeah. One of the things along those lines, at least—I’ve worked with a couple of brands who’ve outsourced returns specifically even, but different products need different processes, and I think that’s what you’re alluding to. But I know one brand whose bedding goes through a very different process for inspection than their clothes. And so, because of that, the 3PL can actually facilitate that and know what that inspection process looks like. I don’t know if that’s something you’ve done with IDF or seen with other 3PLs?

[00:28:45] Glenn Gooding: Yep, for sure. Nice volley back at me there, Jordan. I like it. Any ideas for a quick win or two that a brand could adopt right away to reduce friction for customers during returns?

[00:28:59] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, I actually have some strong opinions here—that you should make returns available to shoppers. And again, you want to optimize for [the] long term, right? And so, if that’s your goal as a brand—optimize for [the] long term and LTV—then you should make that experience as available as possible and think about it as part of the experience rather than, “I want to avoid it at all costs.”

[00:29:23] Jordan Bleak: And I actually see both of those pretty prevalent in the market. And my opinion is that the latter one is the right way to go to optimize for LTV. So, if you think of super small wins—some brands, in their return tracking emails—or sorry, their order tracking emails—on the very last one when it’s delivered—add a button in there that just says, “Hey, it didn’t work out? Here’s how to start a return.”

[00:29:49] Jordan Bleak: I’ve even seen brands put a little thank-you card in their packaging for the same purpose.

[00:29:53] Glenn Gooding: That takes a little—it takes a leap of faith, doesn’t it? To say, “Here, if you want to punt on what you just spent, you want to return it,” that’s a leap of faith for a brand.

[00:30:02] Jordan Bleak: It is—it really is a leap of faith. And again, if you have the right provider that is helping you optimize for exchanges and some of the things we talked about, there’s a little bit of faith there. But long term, I do think and believe that it’s better—strongly.

[00:30:18] Jordan Bleak: Now again, at the stage of a brand, you might not be ready for that, and I recognize not all brands are equal. And so, depending on your economics, depending on the capital situation of are you well-capitalized to be able to start optimizing for those things? Sometimes you’re not.

[00:30:34] Jordan Bleak: But those are easy wins, right? Adding that, or adding a QR code on your thank-you note in the package to make it easy, and trying to optimize for that experience, right?

[00:30:44] Glenn Gooding: Awesome. You make a good point. For the brands listening today, what would be the first step they should take to start turning returns into revenue? A different twist on the question here, but we’ll transition to maybe some meaningful takeaways for brands.

[00:31:02] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, I’m biased, but number one, I’d say sign up for Redo. Shameless plug there.

[00:31:07] Glenn Gooding: Hey, you’ve earned it. You’ve earned it.

[00:31:09] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, that’s great. I really do believe that there’s a lot that can be done—and someone specialized that operates both as a software provider [and a partner]. If you don’t have one, find one. I believe that’s Redo. If it’s not, still—you should do it if you have any sort of volume with returns. That’s an easy, quick win.

[00:31:28] Jordan Bleak: Some of the others are—treat it like your website. I’ve already hit on that. But analyze it the same way. If you haven’t gone through the full experience, go through the full return experience. And I’m even talking—pay the six bucks to ship something to yourself and go through the experience of opening it up, and then go through your return experience.

[00:31:47] Glenn Gooding: There’s tremendous wisdom in that, and it’s shocking how many folks don’t ever do that.

[00:31:54] Jordan Bleak: Totally. There are directors of eComm all the time—[I ask], “Hey, when’s the last time you actually went through that return experience?” And it’s surprising that it’s just not focused on as much as it should be. But it really is a critical part.

[00:32:05] Jordan Bleak: So, that’s the first thing I’d say. The other one that I’d mention is—look into your policy. Go read it. Does it resonate with what you’re trying to accomplish as a brand? And get data on things.

[00:32:14] Jordan Bleak: So, [for example], your return window. Analyze the data. What is the average time that it takes a shopper to submit or start a return? Is it way at the end of your return window? Is it in the middle? Is it way early? That might actually tweak how you think about it—or even extend it further and say, “We’ll do 90 days,” because everyone’s submitting within ten anyway.

[00:32:34] Jordan Bleak: And then, the other one is—change your policy to actually treat some of the first-time shoppers differently, or some of those other groups with high LTV. Some of your best shoppers—they spend three thousand bucks with you as a brand. Of course, I’m saying that’s a lot of money; I know for some brands maybe it’s not. But whatever that threshold is—where those are key shoppers—make it flexible.

[00:32:58 Jordan Bleak: And that can come with a loyalty program and other things maybe too. But those are some of the quick wins that I would say: first, place [a] returns provider, go through the experience, and then kind of optimize your policy with data.

[00:33:10] Glenn Gooding: Awesome. I think those are some great takeaways for brands. I’m going to ask you one more substantive question. What excites you the most about the future of returns management?

[00:33:22] Jordan Bleak: Ooh—yeah, there’s a lot, and I’m very excited about a few of them. We’ve talked a little bit about AI. That is my number one thing that I believe will be very important for returns in the future.

[00:33:36] Jordan Bleak: Just to go a little bit deeper into some of the things that we’re doing—if you can really understand the shopper and really understand the product catalog, you can actually act almost like an associate. If you think of the best retail associate in a store, and someone’s coming in to make a return, what are they doing? They’re getting to know the shopper, they know the product catalog—everything in that store. They’re asking questions, getting to know them, talking about why it didn’t work out, and trying to genuinely suggest products that should be better.

[00:34:11] Jordan Bleak: And online, you just lose so much of that. But with AI, it’s changing the game. And so, you actually can build systems, know the shopper and the products—and even associate them. We’re building ways that you can associate products, like I mentioned, that are going to bring that retail experience into online.

[00:34:30] Glenn Gooding: Super cool. So, the curated buying experience online, right? Specific to a Glenn Gooding’s demographic and buying practices—or Jordan Bleak’s, or whomever.

[00:34:41] Jordan Bleak: Totally, yep. And everyone is different, right? I have a certain style, and I want those things. And if I purchase from a brand, I like something—surely there’s something in that store that we should optimize for. So there’s a lot more that I’m excited about with international. It’s a black box for brands really want to help there. And there’s a lot we’re doing right now to help with that for brands—a lot with fraud, which is also a black box for brands. And then warranties is the last one that I’ll briefly mention. Warranties are, yeah, a return with a really complex policy—and sometimes black-boxy and painful too.

[00:35:17] Glenn Gooding: You bet. You bet. Maybe we’ll have you on again and dive into some of those nooks and crannies—those black boxes. Well, I really want to thank you for joining me today. I think my listeners are going to get a ton of value out of this. I want to give you an opportunity to shamelessly plug again, okay? So, where can listeners connect with you or learn more about Redo?

[00:35:37] Jordan Bleak: Yeah, so first place—go to our website: getredo.com. It goes over a lot of what we’ve talked about today. Really, I do recommend just talking to one of our salespeople if you are serious about looking into a returns provider. But you can sign up there.

[00:35:52] Jordan Bleak: And there’s also a lot more about the other products that we’re building—a lot of AI and what we’re doing really is based around trying to build and aggregate a lot of those touchpoints for the shopper experience, and being able to now utilize them in those touch points across different products. So, there’s a lot more that you can learn there if you are interested or want to connect—honestly, just email me. It’s jordan@getredo.com. Happy to connect there or on LinkedIn. There [aren’t] too many Jordan Bleaks out there.

[00:36:22] Glenn Gooding: One of a kind. One of a kind. Jordan, thank you so much. And listeners, thank you for listening to another episode of Parcel Perspectives. I found it very interesting and frankly, I think a very rewarding topic if you take care of this process and view it as a revenue opportunity.

[00:36:42] Glenn Gooding: Until next time, thank you.

[00:36:44] Jordan Bleak: Thanks, Glenn.

[00:36:45] Glenn Gooding: Thanks.

[00:36:51] Glenn Gooding: Thanks for listening to Parcel Perspectives, hosted by me, Glenn Gooding. I’ve been in the small parcel space for 37 years—starting with a deep and broad background working for one of the major carriers as an operator and industrial engineer, later managing pricing at the highest level for the largest, most complex shippers in the world.

[00:37:10] Glenn Gooding: Since then, I’ve been a national thought leader and worked to help drive strategy for clients—from Fortune 50 companies to startup e-commerce businesses—helping them more competitively align in this complex and expensive market.

[00:37:23] Glenn Gooding: If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and share with friends. Join us next time for more expert advice and strategies to stay ahead of the shipping game.