Skip to main content
All CollectionsGuides & Best Practices
🛍 Optimize Return handling for Holiday Season Sales
🛍 Optimize Return handling for Holiday Season Sales

Holiday Season Returns Made Easy: Best Practices for Black Friday & Beyond

Vineeta Pendse avatar
Written by Vineeta Pendse
Updated over 2 weeks ago

As you prepare for the busiest season of the year, it’s a great time to optimize your return process for smoother operations and a better customer experience. Proactively communicate any return policy changes to customers on your website and order confirmation emails to set clear expectations during sales. To help you with this, here are key yayloh features and best practices to help streamline your returns during peak season.

📍 Important to note: If you have multiple stores, the settings for each store need to be managed separately.


Configure & Update Your Return Settings for the Sale Season:

💡 Need help with implementation? We're here to support you!

  1. Block returns and/or exchanges for sales items.

    Restrict returns or exchanges for discounted items to manage expectations and reduce peak season costs. (Learn how)

  2. Adjust Return Windows for Sales Orders

    Extend or reduce your return window based on order date. Think shorter windows for Black Friday/Cyber Monday orders.  (Learn how)

  3. Test Your Return Flow

    Create a test order and process a test return request to ensure all instructions align with your return policy. Update any unclear instructions in yayloh’s settings for a smooth user experience.

  4. Automate Return Fee Deductions

    Automatically deduct return fees based on market and carrier to speed up refund processing and maximise return fees (Read more). These can be configured based on sender country, return carriers, delivery carriers, and order value.

  5. Implement region-specific return policies

    Tailor your policies based on market demand: consider offering free exchanges locally, and providing store credit alternatives for international returns where shipping costs are higher. This helps protect margins while remaining customer-friendly.

  6. Optimize Return Reasons for Insights

    Ensure your return reasons provide valuable business insights. Remove options that don’t offer insights and add options that help you gather data useful for product and size improvements.

  7. Simplify International Returns

    Use yayloh’s commercial invoice solutions with UPS, DHL, and FedEx to manage international returns more easily, reducing customs complexities for your customers.

  8. Automate In-Store Return Processing

    Enable in-store returns automation for refunds or store credit, providing faster, smoother refunds for in-store purchases.


Check your data in yayloh to identify improvement areas

💡 Download the datasets, run a good-old pivot table and identify action area to and update size guides and return policies.

  1. Spot Retention Opportunities

    Identify retention potential using our repurchase after return dataset and return reasons breakdown.

    If the dataset shows 15% of customers repurchasing within 30 days of a return, or if “too big” and “too small” are top return reasons, consider offering free exchanges.

  2. Analyze Regional Return Behaviors

    Identify markets with high return rates and adjust return policies based on regional behaviors

  3. Use AI for Sentiment Analysis

    Upload customer comments to your AI tool to identify action points.

  4. Identify Sizing Issues

    Check your report double sizing” to identify which products your customers are struggling the most with sizing. Update product descriptions or add more detailed size guides to reduce sizing-related returns.

  5. Top Returned Products
    Review your top 100 products and examine return reasons. Update product pages with clearer size and fit information to help customers choose the right items.

  6. Re-engage First-Time Buyers
    Spot new customers who returned their first order and create targeted campaigns to encourage repeat purchases, offering incentives or alternative products.


Did this answer your question?