Prepping for Refunds and Exchanges

After the rush of the holidays and the gifts have been opened and unwrapped, the season of refunds and exchanges begins.  While the sweater given to me by Aunt Mabel would work great for next year’s ugly sweater party, I have a feeling that a trip to the store to return some unwanted gifts will be sure to occur.

Prepare for the Rush: This is the time of the year when most retailers see a spike in the average number of refunds processed.  While many of these are legitimate, those that are seeking to defraud the company will also use this time to their advantage. There are several ways to prepare you ahead of time for this busy return season.  The first is to make sure that you have updated your registers and have set up any refund specific registers in your Aspect EliteLP system.  This will help in your analysis of transactions to these refund-only registers so that they can be looked at with different thresholds.

Know the Policy: This is also a good time to make sure that your associates are aware of the correct policies for refunds.  These are important reminders not only about the policy for external customers but also can help remind employees about the policy on employee refunds.  You will want to be aware of employee refunds to make sure that the employee discounts are being applied and taken into account as needed.  Employees can see refunds as a way to return merchandise purchased with their employee discount and receive more than they paid for the item when it is returned. 

Be on the Look Out: Another simple tip for the busy return season is to make sure that your receipt tape is kept locked up and out of sight.  Many organized retail crime groups will see unlocked receipt tape as an open invitation to make their own fraudulent receipts from the comfort of their own home. Also, remind your associates to look inside returned packages.  An article from Stores.Org, (Click here to read) highlighted some of the items that have been found inside packages returned after the customer has received their refund. 

Adjust: You may also want to adjust your thresholds so that you make sure you aren’t overwhelmed with AutoMIND alerts that are triggered simply due to the higher volume.  Make a plan to adjust refund thresholds as the business picks up. 

Refund fraud is expected to cost retailers over $3.5 billion this holiday season alone according to an article by NRF (Click here to read).  In our next blog we will look at some Aspect EliteLP tips for analyzing the refund transactions as they begin to enter your system.  I hope that you have found these holiday tips to be helpful over the past few weeks.  We plan to continue with our weekly blog so please make sure to email and let us know which areas you would like to see discussed.

Please enjoy the upcoming Holidays. Here’s to hoping that those “Oh you really shouldn’t have” gifts come with gift receipts to make your holiday return season even easier!