Automating returns: what works and what does not

There is a stack of boxes by the door. Someone on your team opens them, digs up the matching order, checks whether it is still within the deadline, books the item back into stock, starts the refund and types an email to the customer who has already asked twice where their money is. Four times a day, every day. Automating returns is not about receiving fewer returns, that is a different problem with a different solution. It is about the administrative tail attached to every single return. This article covers how many days really sit in that tail, what a return costs according to Dutch research, which steps you can genuinely automate and when you should not start at all.

Where a return loses its time: 23 days in three parts

Returns platform Returnless analysed 2024 data and surveyed webshops for its Return Benchmark report. The headline finding for you: it takes 23 days on average before a returned product is available in stock again (source: Returnless Return Benchmark, via Emerce, November 2025).

Those 23 days split into three parts. First, an average of thirteen days pass before a customer even registers a return after delivery. Then the shipment back takes two days. Finally, processing the product and refunding the customer takes another eight days.

Look at that split again. You cannot buy your way out of the two transit days. The thirteen days of waiting can be shortened a little with an easy return form and a friendly reminder. But those eight days between arrival and refund? That is your warehouse, your inbox, your bookkeeping. Almost everything automation can touch sits there. And it is exactly the part most webshops have never put a stopwatch on.

What a return costs you

The Dutch ministries of Infrastructure and Water Management and of Economic Affairs commissioned research into mandatory return fees on textiles. That final report contains a number every webshop should know: processing a return typically costs between 12 and 17 euros. Where part of that is passed on to the customer, the amount charged averages 2.26 euros (source: final report Research into Mandatory Return Fees on Textiles, Rebel Circular Economy, TAUW and Ecolaw, 1 September 2025).

Be honest about what makes up that amount: a large share is shipping and physical work. Unpacking, inspecting, repacking and putting an item back on the shelf is something no system removes. What you do remove is the paperwork around it. That is not the whole amount, but it is the part that demands someone's attention with every single return.

How many returns you get depends heavily on what you sell. The average return rate across the full year sits at 23.5 percent, fashion included (source: Returnless, via Emerce, November 2025). In fashion, return rates average between 20 and 40 percent, with outliers up to 50 percent (source: final report on mandatory return fees on textiles, September 2025). If you sell tools, parts or B2B goods you are well below that. Use your own number, not the average.

Which steps you can genuinely automate

Automating returns is not a switch you flip. It is a row of separate actions, some of which you take off your people's plate. These are the ones that lend themselves best to it in practice:

• The registration itself. A return form on your site where the customer enters an order number and picks a reason, instead of an email someone has to retype.
• The deadline check. Does this return fall inside the cooling-off period? That is date arithmetic, not judgement.
• Creating and sending the return label, with the right carrier and the right return address.
• Keeping the customer informed: received, inspected, refunded. Three messages nobody needs to type.
• The link to your stock: once an item is approved, it is up for sale again.
• Preparing the refund in your payment system, including the original delivery costs where the law requires it.
• The entry in your bookkeeping, so revenue and VAT are right without manual corrections.
• The overview: which returns are open, which are waiting on you and which are running up against a deadline.

Note what is not in that list: deciding. With nearly every smaller company this design works best, the system does the looking up, the date maths and the typing, and puts the doubtful cases in front of a person. Ten seconds per return instead of ten minutes, and the decision stays where it belongs.

The most underrated item on that list is the last one. As long as you cannot see which returns are open, every return is a loose note. Once you can see it, it becomes a list that gets shorter.

What automation does not solve

We are always clear about this, even when it sells less well: part of the returns problem does not get solved here.

• Your return rate. Automation processes returns faster but prevents none of them. Fewer returns come from better sizing photos, better product pages, clear delivery information and sometimes from charging for returns.
• The physical inspection. Someone has to hold the item to see whether it is unused. For clothing, electronics and anything that can be damaged, that stays human work.
• The exceptions. A warranty claim is not a withdrawal, a B2B order does not fall under the same rules, and a custom-made product can often be refused outright. Keep those cases out of the automation instead of forcing them in.
• The customer who waits thirteen days. A reminder helps, but you do not steer the behaviour of someone who leaves the box in the hallway.
• A messy process. If three people currently do it three different ways, you are only automating that chaos faster. Agree on how it should work first, then build.

The clock that runs alongside: 14 days

With consumer returns a legal deadline runs alongside, and it is tighter than many owners realise. The rules as the Dutch consumer authority ACM states them: the cooling-off period is 14 days after the product is delivered. After cancelling the purchase the customer has 14 days to send the product back. And you refund within 14 days after the customer cancels. You may wait until you have the product back, or until the customer proves they sent it (source: ACM). The same 14-day rules apply across the EU.

Now hold that rule next to the practical figures. Two days in transit plus eight days of processing and refunding is ten days, if everything goes well. Add a week of holiday, or a box that sits on the counter for two days, and you are over the line. The Dutch authority checks this and has fined webshops for it.

This is exactly the kind of work software does better than people: remembering a date, counting down and raising a flag in time. Not because your team cannot do it, but because nobody keeps fifty running deadlines in their head on a busy Monday in January, the month in which more than four in ten webshop orders come back (source: Returnless, via Emerce, November 2025).

Off-the-shelf returns portal or something custom?

Honest advice: do not start with custom work. For a standard webshop with standard products there are off-the-shelf returns portals that handle the form, the label and the status emails perfectly well for a few tens of euros a month. Running on a common webshop platform with returns that are all the same kind? Take one of those. We will say so, and we are done.

Something custom only becomes interesting once you hit the edges of those standard tools. That usually happens in these situations:

• You sell through several channels, your own shop, a marketplace, perhaps a physical store, and each channel has its own return flow.
• The return has to land in your own stock or ERP system, not in a separate tool you then retype out of anyway.
• You have exceptions no standard tool understands: warranty claims, exchanges instead of refunds, installation work, B2B customers with their own terms.
• Most return requests simply arrive by email and WhatsApp, and those never reach a portal.
• You want to know why products come back, per item, so you can fix the product pages causing it.

That last one is the only item in this whole article that can genuinely lower your return rate. Faster processing saves time; knowing which item consistently runs small saves returns.

The maths: when it pays off

Do this sum with your own numbers, not ours. Take the number of returns per month and clock, for one week, how many minutes of admin go into each one: handling the registration, looking things up, emailing, booking, refunding. Measure, do not estimate, that number always lands differently than people expect.

A worked example with round numbers (not a measured figure): 200 returns a month, 6 minutes of admin each, is 20 hours a month. Take half of that away and you have 10 hours a month, plus the errors you no longer fix and the deadlines you no longer miss. At an average item value of 60 euros and 200 returns, there is also 12,000 euros of stock sitting inside the returns process. Every day you shorten that chain is a day that money can work again.

What it costs to have built depends on how many systems have to join in. At Socialo it looks like this:

• Return form, automatic status emails and an overview of open returns, linked to one webshop: small project, 300 to 5,000 euros one-off.
• Multiple channels, links to your stock and accounting software, exceptions and deadline monitoring: medium project, 5,000 to 12,000 euros.
• Maintenance after that: 100 to 750 euros a month for something small, 750 to 1,500 euros if your business runs on it daily.

Why maintenance? Because carriers change their labels, your webshop gets an update and your range shifts. A returns flow nobody maintains is a returns flow you no longer trust a year from now. And a system you do not trust, you check by hand anyway, which puts you back where you started.

How to start on Monday

You do not need to turn this into a project. One morning, five questions:

• Count last month's returns. Under 30 a month: skip the custom work, a standard portal is enough.
• Clock the minutes per return for a week. Do not estimate, record it.
• Take the last ten returns and write down how many days passed between arrival and refund. Above five days and you are running into the legal deadline.
• Look at where return requests arrive now: portal, email, phone, WhatsApp. Everything that does not come through a form is manual work.
• List your top three return reasons. If one item stands out, start there, not with software.

Then start small: one channel, the most common return reason, and an overview showing what is open. If that works, extend it to the rest. If it does not, you have lost very little.