You have most likely noticed that eBay now has a return rate metric on your seller dashboard. While eBay CLAIMS it is only providing the information for use by sellers and is NOT judging sellers by that metric, you can expect that to change as eBay gains confidence in their return rate calculations and works the bugs out.
So, it is in your own best interest to get a handle on this now and figure out how to reduce that rate. We have all seen eBay crackdowns on sellers, eliminating hundreds, or even thousands of sellers at a time, simply for falling below what they consider to be an acceptable level of whatever it is they are measuring. It would be very easy for eBay to identify the sellers with the highest return rates and simply close their accounts. Because in eBay's eyes a return equals an unhappy buyer. Amazon has been doing this for some time now.
So, the question becomes, what is an acceptable level of returns? How do I know if my return rate is good or bad? While we cannot answer these questions in an exact way, we can make some guesses based on some measurements we can find for online retail. These are not numbers specific to eBay, so eBay's average return rate could be higher or lower, but you would do well to stay on the low side of the scale.
For example, in 2013, average return rates for web-only retailers was 3.47% overall. And then, you can further break it down by category, because some categories have higher rates of returns than other categories. Apparel for example, consistently has return rates at the high end of the scale. This is because of items not fitting properly, or can be due to the fact that color on every monitor is set differently, so the dress that looked great online may not be the exact color you were expecting. So, if your return rate is on the high side of the average, dig a little bit deeper and find the average return rate for your category. Your return rate may be low going by those numbers.
Generally speaking, anyone on eBay with a return rate above 5% should probably worry about eBay taking this metric into account in the future. I would aim for a return rate of 2.5% or less. The lower, the better.
I have a return rate of less that one half of one percent. Years ago, I was trying to figure out why people returned items. Not because of eBay or Amazon, but because returns are costly and can really drag on profits. I found that in most cases, it was because someone had ordered a book from me and received one that was slightly different from the description and ISBN numbers. For example, I had a paperback in stock, but my listing mentioned a hardback. So, I started cleaning up my listings and being careful not to just copy and paste an old listing, but to make sure the ISBN was correct and that it was the correct version of the book that was being listed. This drove my return rate from 3% to where it is today at less than 1%.
Of course, what steps you have to take depends on what category of items you sell, and why you find that your buyers were returning the items.
Here is a link you can go to to see what the average return rates for online retail are. They have the general figures and the category breakdowns:
https://www.internetretailer.com/201...st-return-rate
