Reduce Returns, Prevent Fraud, Cut Costs
Returns are not just a cost of doing business. North American retailers' return rate percentages range from the low single digits to the mid-teens—but wherever you fall, studies show that approximately 8% of your return dollars are fraudulent. In fact, merchandise return fraud and abuse is estimated to be a $14.3–$18.4 billion annual problem in the retail industry. For a typical $1 billion retailer, that could be up to a $10 million exposure (as much as 1% of your annual revenue), hidden in your finances, adding to your costs and detracting from your net sales. That figure is big enough to place renewed focus on solving some basic issues at the return counter.
Verify-2 identifies fraudulent and abusive consumer behavior. It is the most widely used return optimization tool in the industry, and is proven effective in significantly reducing return rates at major retailers, prompting the Wall Street Journal to state that Verify Return Authorization™ “can now be found in every mall in America.” The return process is optimized because the Verify-2 analytical modeling accounts for numerous factors, including your return policies and your shoppers’ purchase and return behavior, which helps make the best decisions to balance customer service and fraud/abuse prevention.
How It Works
Return fraud represents considerable dollars, but it’s a problem too complex to address with simple, across-the-board return policy changes. Verify-2 is a real-time, consumer-based return authorization system, that uses predictive algorithms and statistical models to distinguish and deter fraudulent and abusive return behavior in-store, online, or in the call center.
Traditional return practices are flawed because they don’t really consider the activities of the returner. Consumer-based return authorization is much more effective because it tracks consumer behavior and detects patterns of fraud and abuse before too much financial damage is done.
Proven Results and Guaranteed ROI
A powerful deterrent, Verify-2 lets you individually address fraudulent returners, reduces the number of unprofitable consumers, stops the financial drain, and leads to considerable improvement in margin dollars. The science behind the optimization allows you to be confident of the results and simplifies your internal justification.
- Most customers are unaffected; denies returns only to the worst offenders (the 1% of your returners that are fraudulent/abusive).
- Considerable reduction in return dollars.
- Corresponding reduction in shrink.
- Significant and measurable ROI, with almost immediate payback.
