- Original Poster
- #1
Hello All,
We've been reviewing an on-going trend of customers, who are students, making up nearly all of our returns, order cancellation and fraudulent incidents. It's been a tough issue for us to try combat while wanting to support genuine educational customers. Overall, our "returns and incidents" rate is around 0.8% of all orders. It's low however there's still a persistent headache issue. We stopped offering a student discount because of this last year, while still offering discounts to educational providers, but that's not resolved high-value items being falsely returned as "new and unused" when they used and often not fit for resale in their returned condition. Having to then reject returns often doesn't go down well, leading to charge backs or abuse from the student. If we can restore/repair any items sent back, we take the loss but some high-value items (up to £1000) cannot easily be reset/reconfigured back to factory default or are damaged and clearly not fit for resale.
A bit of back story, we're a specialist training and tools provider in the UK. We operate an online store, as well as amazon and eBay. Often supplying to other educational training and service providers but also directly to students as well. Over the last 3 years, over 90% of order cancellations, returns and fraud incidents have been students. These issues will affect many businesses and customers who are not students, but our in-depth review of this (by checking delivery addresses of these problematic customers) are nearly all student halls and edu email addresses. I know this is not something we're ever going to fully solve but am trying to make improvements where possible.
Students are also often trying to sign up a business resellers/educational providers to get discounts and our sales team has to weed out the fake ones.
Most notably, we've had the following incidents and trends:
1. Students purchasing items for projects or a specific use case, then returning them as "new & unused". Even using different emails to contact support about their products, then returning after once no longer needed used/damaged and unfit for re-sale.
2. Orders being returned for exchange of product, but are used/damaged within tolerance, are sent different products but these are also then returned as "new/unused". Resulting in two sets of used items.
3. Placing an order and cancelling after being shipped, then requesting a refund on the basis it's not arrived either with PayPal or via support ticket.
4. Purchasing low cost items shipped with our free postage, which is untracked royal mail 2nd class, then stating it's not arrived. There's obvious potential for it to be legitimately not turning up but the consistent student factor is far to high compared to non-student lost/delayed mail.
5. Purchasing large orders late in the evening on weekends, then requesting a cancellation/refund leading to a loss of payment provider fees.
Some things we have tried to make improvements with:
1. Removing our student discount
2. Making our returns policy more clear and present on our support ticket forms (return, cancellation, adjustment etc)
3. Adding extra steps to validate reseller application forms.
4. Reducing tolerances on used products. Anything is that is clearly damaged/used is sent back to the customer and rejected from being returned for a refund. We used to ask for the return postage to be paid but this lead to charge backs, so now we return ship at our own cost if the items is high value.
5. Offering store credit instead of a refund in situations where the items are used/damaged but could be restored by an engineer/manufacture.
6. Using EVRI tracked parcels to replace royal mail 2nd class.
7. Using stripes chargeback protection and custom radar rules
Does anyone else have any other suggestions or ideas to combat fraudulent returns? It's hard when one of our main target markets is educational/research but it's becoming more obvious when orders are going out we know there's a high chance it's coming back if there's certain indicators.
We've been reviewing an on-going trend of customers, who are students, making up nearly all of our returns, order cancellation and fraudulent incidents. It's been a tough issue for us to try combat while wanting to support genuine educational customers. Overall, our "returns and incidents" rate is around 0.8% of all orders. It's low however there's still a persistent headache issue. We stopped offering a student discount because of this last year, while still offering discounts to educational providers, but that's not resolved high-value items being falsely returned as "new and unused" when they used and often not fit for resale in their returned condition. Having to then reject returns often doesn't go down well, leading to charge backs or abuse from the student. If we can restore/repair any items sent back, we take the loss but some high-value items (up to £1000) cannot easily be reset/reconfigured back to factory default or are damaged and clearly not fit for resale.
A bit of back story, we're a specialist training and tools provider in the UK. We operate an online store, as well as amazon and eBay. Often supplying to other educational training and service providers but also directly to students as well. Over the last 3 years, over 90% of order cancellations, returns and fraud incidents have been students. These issues will affect many businesses and customers who are not students, but our in-depth review of this (by checking delivery addresses of these problematic customers) are nearly all student halls and edu email addresses. I know this is not something we're ever going to fully solve but am trying to make improvements where possible.
Students are also often trying to sign up a business resellers/educational providers to get discounts and our sales team has to weed out the fake ones.
Most notably, we've had the following incidents and trends:
1. Students purchasing items for projects or a specific use case, then returning them as "new & unused". Even using different emails to contact support about their products, then returning after once no longer needed used/damaged and unfit for re-sale.
2. Orders being returned for exchange of product, but are used/damaged within tolerance, are sent different products but these are also then returned as "new/unused". Resulting in two sets of used items.
3. Placing an order and cancelling after being shipped, then requesting a refund on the basis it's not arrived either with PayPal or via support ticket.
4. Purchasing low cost items shipped with our free postage, which is untracked royal mail 2nd class, then stating it's not arrived. There's obvious potential for it to be legitimately not turning up but the consistent student factor is far to high compared to non-student lost/delayed mail.
5. Purchasing large orders late in the evening on weekends, then requesting a cancellation/refund leading to a loss of payment provider fees.
Some things we have tried to make improvements with:
1. Removing our student discount
2. Making our returns policy more clear and present on our support ticket forms (return, cancellation, adjustment etc)
3. Adding extra steps to validate reseller application forms.
4. Reducing tolerances on used products. Anything is that is clearly damaged/used is sent back to the customer and rejected from being returned for a refund. We used to ask for the return postage to be paid but this lead to charge backs, so now we return ship at our own cost if the items is high value.
5. Offering store credit instead of a refund in situations where the items are used/damaged but could be restored by an engineer/manufacture.
6. Using EVRI tracked parcels to replace royal mail 2nd class.
7. Using stripes chargeback protection and custom radar rules
Does anyone else have any other suggestions or ideas to combat fraudulent returns? It's hard when one of our main target markets is educational/research but it's becoming more obvious when orders are going out we know there's a high chance it's coming back if there's certain indicators.
