The Return Rate: A Return Costs Far More Than the Refund. Most Sellers Only Count the Refund.

A $48 item comes back and it feels like it cost $48. It didn't. The outbound shipping is gone, the return label is paid, someone spends fifteen minutes inspecting and relisting, the platform keeps part of the fee, and one in five comes back unsellable: $26.50 of real cost — 55% of the item's price — on top of a sale that produced nothing. At 6.5% of 420 orders a month, that's $8,681 a year.

How it works

• One Return — every line, including the two nobody counts: your handling time at your real rate, and the expected inventory loss on the ones that never sell again
• The Causes — a month of returns sorted into four buckets and priced. In the sample, "not as expected" and "wrong size" are 65% of the bill — $5,643 a year — and both are listing problems wearing a customer's name
• The Fixes — photograph the thing that disappoints people (the sheen, the seam, the scale); publish measurements instead of sizes; test-drop your own box; write the policy like a human and honor it fast; flag the serial returner without building a mean policy for everyone. Plus the honest note: a 0% return rate usually means your listings undersell

Built for

Etsy sellers · Shopify stores · apparel and accessory brands · boutiques — anyone who has ever opened a return box and felt the day change.

What you get

One .xlsx file, four tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no subscription. Platform fee-refund rules vary — set that line honestly for yours.