Emanuel Ruiz shares tactics Amazon sellers use to cut returns across his supplement, shoe cleaning, and sports brands. Custom packaging, plastic wrap seals, and extra taping make returns harder. The goal is packaging that discourages people from sending items back.
So let's talk about Amazon returns, because Amazon's very lenient with their returns, and you'll likely have a high return rate if you don't do things to prevent them. And I'll give you guys a story. Like, I own 3 different brands on Amazon, and this— these brands are in the supplement space, in the shoe cleaning space, and in the sports and outdoors. And sometimes I'll get random returns. We're talking about like a pizza spatula cutting board. And obviously Amazon doesn't go ahead and verify these products and they just return it. They return anything. All right. So what are certain things that you can do to prevent a customer returning an item? And this is all psychological, right? Like Amazon's going to accept any type of returns if allowed. Obviously hazmat material, dangerous goods, consumption consumables, um, aren't being allowed to be returned on Amazon. But let's talk about the majority of us, 99% of us that sell on Amazon, that their item is returnable. What can you go ahead and do? One thing that went ahead and prevented, or went ahead and allowed my return rate for, let's say, my shoe cleaning business to go from like an 8% return rate down to like a 4% return rate is literally going ahead and applying wrap seal. So going ahead and having custom packaging with a plastic seal around it where a customer has to go ahead and physically open it. And I'm telling you, like, it deterred customers from returning this actual item because it was sealed, wrapped, right? So a customer thought it was open, and if they returned it, well, they already opened it, right? Obviously Amazon's still going to accept those type of returns, but doing stuff that psychologically changes the customer's mind that, hey, I can't return this because I just opened this actual item. So custom packaging is really good. Uh, taping your items shut, being hard to actually go ahead and returning the actual item. Maybe, you know, being able to have the item, uh, be built, right? Not coming all in one package when it does get delivered to your actual customer. You see, there's different techniques you could go ahead and do this. And no, it's not against terms of service. It's just going ahead and psychologically changing a customer's mind when it comes to returns.
