Refunds and disputes: the rules to write before your first angry message
You will refund orders. That is not a failure of your store, it is a line in its cost structure. What decides whether it stays a small line is a set of rules written while nothing is wrong — because a rule invented during an angry message is always the expensive one.
A refund and a dispute are not the same event
| You refund | They dispute with their bank | |
|---|---|---|
| You lose | Product + postage | Product + postage + fee, and the amount is taken back |
| Who decides | You | Their bank, usually in their favour |
| Time cost | Minutes | Evidence, forms, weeks of waiting |
| Side effect | None | Counted against your dispute rate |
| The relationship | Recoverable | Over |
The four rules to write now
- Our fault: refund in full, immediately, no return required. Wrong item, damaged, never arrived, arrived far outside the window you promised. Asking someone to post a broken item back across an ocean costs more than the item and buys a dispute.
- Their change of mind: state whether you accept it, and who pays the return. Either answer is acceptable; silence is not. Cross-border returns are often uneconomic — if you do not accept them, say so plainly on the product page, not only in a policy nobody opens.
- Sizing and expectations: prevent, do not arbitrate. Real measurements in real units on the page, photographed on something for scale. Every returned garment is a sentence you did not write.
- A deadline for both of you. How long after delivery can they ask, and how fast do you answer. Published, and then honoured.
The first hour of a complaint
Speed matters more than wording. A customer who gets a human answer in an hour almost never goes to their bank; a customer who waits two days often does, and by then it is out of your hands.
- Answer, even if you do not have the answer yet. "I can see your order, I am checking with the warehouse now, I will write again today" resolves most of the anxiety before you have resolved anything.
- Never argue about the delivery window you wrote. If it was optimistic, that is your fault and you pay for it. Then fix the page.
- Decide by the rules above, not by the tone of the message. This is exactly why the rules are written down — the angriest customer should not get the best outcome.
- Offer the choice. Refund or resend, their pick. A resend keeps the sale and often costs you less than the refund.
Reading your refund rate as a signal
Track refunds by reason, not just by number. The number tells you what it cost; the reason tells you what to change.
- Mostly "too slow" — your window is optimistic, or a route is worse than you thought. Fix the page or the warehouse.
- Mostly "not as described" — the supplier photographs are flattering, or the description is. Order one yourself and rewrite from what arrived.
- Mostly sizing — measurements are missing or in the wrong units for that market.
- Concentrated on one product — remove it. A single item with a high refund rate can quietly consume the margin of everything around it.
A refund rate that sits still is a cost. A refund rate you read every month is a list of improvements someone else paid for.
Questions
- Should I ever refuse a refund?
- Yes — for a change of mind outside your stated window, if that policy was clearly visible before purchase. But weigh it against the dispute: on a low-value item, refunding is usually cheaper than winning.
- Do I have to accept returns from another country?
- Often not economically, and there is no shame in saying so before the sale. What is not acceptable is promising returns and then making them impossible in practice.
- What refund rate is normal?
- It varies too much by category for a benchmark to help. Use your own as the baseline and watch the direction: rising means something upstream changed, and that is the signal worth acting on.
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