A brand signs a fulfilment contract focused on picking and shipping. In January thirty percent of December's orders come back, nobody agreed what happens to an item with a scuffed box, and the warehouse is holding four pallets of returns while someone decides.
Returns are an afterthought in most contracts and a significant share of the real cost.
What brands ask
They usually ask what happens when an item comes back, how quickly it is processed, who inspects it, how condition is decided, whether items are repackaged, what happens to unsellable stock, how the brand is told, how it is charged and how returns appear in stock figures.
Inspection and grading need written rules
What counts as resellable, what needs repackaging, what is refurbished and what is written off. Without a documented standard, the warehouse guesses and the brand disagrees.
Example conversations
These scripts use information a provider might publish. Your answers should come from your own pages.
Brand: How do you handle returns? Assistant: The returns page explains the process from receipt through inspection and grading to restocking or disposal, with the charges for each step. It also explains the turnaround and how stock figures are updated. Could you tell me your monthly order volume and your typical return rate?
Brand: Who decides whether something can be resold? Assistant: You set the grading rules and the warehouse applies them, and the page explains how those rules are agreed and documented at onboarding. It also explains what happens to items that fall outside them.
Brand: What happens to items we cannot resell? Assistant: The page explains the options, including holding for your instruction, returning to you, routing to a clearance channel or disposal, along with the costs and any storage charge while a decision is pending.
Turnaround affects the brand's cash
Stock sitting unprocessed is stock that cannot be sold. Publishing a processing turnaround, and meeting it, is worth more to a growing brand than a lower per-item rate.
Price the labour honestly
Opening, inspecting, cleaning, repackaging and relabelling take real time and vary by product. A single per-item rate across everything means one of you is losing money on every return.
Decide what happens to unsellable stock
Holding it indefinitely fills a warehouse with somebody else's problem. Agreeing disposal authority, clearance routes and storage charges up front prevents pallets of dead stock.
Visibility prevents disputes
A brand that can see what arrived, how it was graded and what happened next will not argue about the invoice. One that receives a monthly total will.
Peak makes all of this worse
January volumes arrive right after the busiest period, which connects to peak season capacity questions from growing brands.
Agree it during onboarding
Returns rules belong in the setup, not in a crisis, which is the case made in client onboarding questions at a third-party warehouse.
Brands compare providers on this
It comes up whenever a brand outgrows its own storage, as in warehousing enquiries from growing online brands, and the customer-facing side is covered in how ecommerce chatbots handle shipping and returns questions.
Getting started
Publish your returns process, grading approach, charges and turnaround, then capture volumes and return rates at any hour. SpideyChat for logistics providers answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.