Webinar recap: The power of pairing Loop and Happy Returns
Vaishali Ravi
·July 19, 2024
At Loop, we believe that collaboration is essential to building best-in-class merchant experiences—and we’re thrilled to formalize our partnership with Happy Returns, a UPS-owned brand that operates over 90,000 Return Bar® locations.
In this webinar, Kent Woodyard, Strategic Business Development Director at Loop, and Matt Thomas, Enterprise Account Executive at Happy Returns, joined forces to discuss how our brands work together to help merchants build and run successful ecommerce returns operations.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation:
Brand introductions
Whether you’re new to Loop or new to Happy Returns, both brands have been delighting ecommerce merchants—and their customers—for years.
Loop was founded in 2017 by a Shopify Plus agency, as a way to help its ecommerce customers solve the problem of time-consuming manual returns. Through its AI-powered returns platform, Loop has helped over 4,000 Shopify brands process over two million returns a month, retaining $1.1 billion in sales. The company is also backed by Shopify as an investor, ensuring a strong partnership between Loop and the Shopify ecosystem.
When Happy Returns launched in 2015, they focused on providing an end-to-end returns experience that delighted customers and merchants alike with the opportunity to process online returns at in-store locations. The following year, they innovated by offering label-less, boxless-returns. Since their acquisition by UPS in 2023, Happy Returns has grown its Return Bar® network to more than 9,000 convenient locations.
There was a natural synergy between the two return solutions, and since 2022, Loop has offered a Happy Returns integration that enables merchants to offer box-free returns at any of Happy Returns’ Return Bar® locations. Customers were delighted with the option, with 81% of shoppers choosing to use Happy Returns’ drop-off options rather than printing mailing labels on their own. Drop-offs were also a clear win for merchants, who were able to save $4.1 million on shipping costs through bulk consolidation.
Given the success we’ve had, we knew that officially joining forces would help us grow faster together: Happy Returns now recommends Loop as its preferred returns portal partner for Shopify brands, and our brands are collaborating on product development to ensure a streamlined experience for merchants using both Loop and Happy Returns.
How Loop + Happy Returns can power merchant success
Loop and Happy Returns together help merchants save on operational costs, reduce manual labor, and deliver a superior customer experience. Here are some of the key benefits:
Deliver a better customer experience
“Market research shows that box free and label free returns have become the number one preferred method to make a return for US consumers,” says Thomas. “So they’re no longer a nice to have, but really table stakes for e-commerce retailers that want to be competitive.”
By presenting box-free returns through Happy Returns as an option for shipping back returns, your brand can provide customers with a convenient alternative to hunting for a box and tape. When dropping off a return through Happy Returns, customers simply need to show their QR code at a Return Bar® location, and it will be instantly scanned in for processing after item verification. Once the product has been scanned in, the customer’s refund may be processed instantly, resulting in a great returns experience for the shopper.
Increase your revenue retention through exchanges
Of course, you want customers to have a great returns experience in any case—but it’s better for your bottom line if you’re able to retain revenue from the transaction.
Loop’s workflows make it easy to optimize for exchanges over refund requests, with a “Shop Now” tool that enables shoppers to browse your entire inventory directly from the returns portal, and apply their exchange credit to a new item. “Loop has invested a lot in making the returns experience feel like shopping,” says Woodyard. “How do we make it not just easy, but actually delightful and enjoyable?”
By pairing this frictionless exchange process with Happy Returns’ frictionless drop-off process, brands that use both solutions are seeing a 19% increase in customer lifetime value.
Reduce operational costs
In a time of increased financial pressure on merchants, using Loop and Happy Returns together provides numerous opportunities for lowering operational costs and improving profit margins.
Loop’s automated workflows enable brands to reduce their reliance on manual support from their CX team, helping you scale your current CX function without adding more headcount. That helps you maximize the impact of every team member and reduce your labor costs.
And by using Happy Returns’ consolidated return shipping at drop-off locations, your brand can take advantage of bulk return shipping rates to drive down the costs of returns. “The reality is it costs a lot of money to send boxes across the country,” says Thomas. “And so anything we can do to save money on that cost of shipping a single item from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, that is going to be the greatest way to make an impact on the overall cost of your returns.”
With consolidated shipping, your brand can wait for a certain number of items to come in before the items are packaged in a single shipment to be returned to your headquarters, saving on shipping materials as well as return shipping fees. To date, Happy Returns customers have saved over $4 million through shipping consolidation.
By pairing Loop’s automation capabilities with Happy Returns’ consolidated shipping options, your brand will be able to streamline operations and cut the costs of running your business.
Curb return fraud
Another area where merchants are struggling is with the rise of return fraud, which now impacts 13.7% of all product returns. Return fraud can cut into your bottom line as a retailer—but by pairing Happy Returns and Loop, merchants can build a proactive strategy for mitigating the impact of return fraud on their businesses.
Happy Returns supports brands in preventing empty box fraud and verifying that the customer is returning the correct item. During the drop-off process, the customer is “handing an unboxed item over to another person,” says Thomas. “That process alone really cuts out a bunch of the intentional fraudulent returns because people are much less likely to do that with that bit of scrutiny. Then when the store associates at the Happy Returns Return Bar® locations are verifying the items, the first thing they’re going to do is check for the hang tag or polybag barcode and scan that as a way of making sure that the items that the shopper is handing over are indeed the items they said they were going to return.”
“We’ve really gotten to a very fine level of detail with the accuracy by introducing these controls. And then of course we have a whole team dedicated to monitoring the performance of every one of our 9,000 locations to make sure that the execution and performance is at a very high level.”
That said, Happy Returns’ store associates can’t verify return conditions against individual return policies—but Loop can.
Using Loop, merchants can set customized conditions for returns, such as that the item must be new in packaging to be eligible for a return. That means, if a customer abuses the policy and sends back an ineligible item, they may be placed on a blocklist to prevent them from getting a refund on future returns until the item is inspected and verified at the merchant’s warehouse.
“The power of the in-person fraud detection that Happy Returns does at the bar, and then the flexibility and customization of Loop’s Workflows tool help us to slowly address the bad actors, address the products that are maybe being targeted for fraud, and continue to reduce the issue over time,” says Woodyard.
Learn more about the power of pairing these best-in-class return solutions by viewing the full webinar below.
In this article
Stay in the loop
Subscribe for product updates and Loop's biweekly newsletter.
Retain more revenue with Loop today
With Loop, your brand can offer everything from refunds to direct exchanges to shopper incentives and more. Even better? These exchanges build your business.