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My thoughts on Ebay Free Returns and a little background info first: I’ve been selling on Ebay for approximately 5 years, with 2.5 years of full-time selling and I’m a Top-Rated Seller with 100% feedback for what that’s worth. My inventory is highly varied with some specialization in a few categories, but I will buy and sell whatever I feel I can make a good profit on. Nearly everything I sell is either used vintage (90% roughly) or new old stock, so I’m not really competing in the race to the bottom with brand new merchandise sellers. Generally, items that I list are either unique or there are not many exactly like it. So, I’m not concerned with Cassini and search rankings; it just seams like a waste of time to me. My items always show up the few times I have done test searches and I currently sell about about 50-60 items per week. I chose not to opt in to the Guaranteed Delivery Program last Fall because it just seemed like another half-baked/unfinished product that Ebay wanted to coerce us into and it offered 0 benefit to me. I sold the most I ever did over the holidays and have not noticed any negative issues as a result of not opting in.
Now to the point, I always try to look at Ebay’s new policies objectively as to how they will affect my profits before drawing a conclusion as to what is best for me. My returns from 1/1/2018 up to now already total 15 or 2.6% of sales. I only had a total of 12 returns in the 15 months prior to this period or less than 1% and they have always been less than 1% the entire time I’ve been selling. I am not doing anything different in the way I list and sell, so I can only attribute this current higher return rate to Ebay’s new ad campaigns, slogans, and word-of-mouth where they push the ideas of fast and free shipping, and free returns. So, even though I don’t offer free returns, I think a lot of customers mistakenly believe this now applies to anything they buy on Ebay. Fortunately, for about 50% of my returns the buyer has been paying to return the item and are honest about why they are returning it. The other 50% are the typical BS INAD returns. I currently average a $77/month discount with the (now only 10%) rebate for being Top-Rated. A few free returns will easily wipe that discount out as it’s not unusual for me to ship something that costs $20-50 in shipping one-way. Not to mention the time (expense) it takes to deal with the return and relisting the item. I seriously doubt that my sales will increase much, if any, if I offer free returns as Ebay will have you believe. Also, I would bet money that anyone who does opt-in to free returns will see an even larger increase in their return rate; especially once this campaign is in full-swing. As far as giving partial refunds on free returns, how would you do this on used items and how many times do you really think Ebay will allow you to do this before they cut you off? I think free returns is inviting the exact kind of customers that you don’t want; the kind that never take responsibility for their own mistakes or the kind that simply want to “rent” your items for free. For now, I will take the wait-and-see approach to offering free returns, because it will probably be very time-consuming to un-do if it’s not working in my favor. Also, contrary to Ebay stating that free returns is the new “industry standard”, within the last 2 weeks I have read 2 articles stating retailers including Best Buy, Home Depot, etc. are monitoring returns either in-house or through outside private companies and they are actually denying returns if a customer has too many (as little as 3). Even Amazon doesn’t offer free returns for just any reason; ask yourself why? My guess is the big boys have calculated that free returns for any reason cost them more than the profit from the additional sales (if any) generated. I currently offer 30 day returns with the buyer having to pay the return shipping and that will be my policy going forward as long as I’m allowed.
Jay, it might be interesting if you could post a new thread with a survey/graph at the top that shows how people plan to handle returns with the 5 current choices: No Returns, 30 Day Returns -buyer pays return shipping, 30 Day Free Returns, 60 day Returns -buyer pays, and 60 Day Free Returns. Then, through comments we could monitor this situation over time and see how free returns are actually working for people once the program is fully implemented.
