In the e-commerce business, order returns can be distressing as they bring down the number of successful shipment deliveries and cut your profits. As sellers, you must be familiar with the term Return to Origin (RTO), meaning non-deliverability of a shipment and its return to the seller’s original pickup address. Shipments are tagged as RTO when the courier partner cannot deliver the shipment owing to the non-availability of the customer and hence sends it back to the shipper’s address.

Therefore, RTO can be an extra cost for sellers due to the apparent return process. Therefore, what is better for your online business is to lower the RTO rate.

Reasons for Non-Delivery of Shipments

There could be various reasons why a shipment remains undelivered. Following are some of the reasons:

The customer is unavailable to receive the shipment.

The customer does not accept the shipment.

The phone number or other relevant information of the customer is incorrect.

Failure in delivery reattempts

Most courier services, such as Ecom Express, reattempt delivery of the order three times before giving an RTO status to the shipment. The courier partner calls the customer and asks for a favourable delivery time. Usually, if the recipient is unavailable, the courier partner will make more attempts to contact the customer.

If the customer does not respond, the courier partner gives the shipment RTO status and returns it to the seller’s address.

Understanding the RTO management process

Once the courier partner has given the order a non-delivered status, the following course of action takes place:

An RTO status is generated if the customer is not reachable by either method or declines the order.
The courier partner then sends back the shipment to the seller’s Original Pickup Address.
The entire return process depends on the agreement between the seller and the courier partner and would include a clause related to shipping charges on RTO orders. However, these charges can be minimised if you use a logistics partner, such as Ecom Express.

You can also price your products so that these shipping costs are incorporated. The key to delivering your shipment within the three reattempts is to ship your shipment via a reliable courier partner which also improves the delivery experience.

When you have the right approach, techniques, and tools you can reduce RTOs for your online business and enable a healthy source of profits and loyalty and competitive advantage.

By integrating with Ecom Express delivery, e-commerce businesses can have an advantage in handling returns.

To simply your e-commerce returns process, speak to our representative now @ 08376 888888 or write to sales@ecomexpress.in