Ask a small shop owner about returns and you will hear about cost. Ask about reviews and you will hear about vanity.
Both readings miss what those two pages are actually doing. A stranger has landed on a shop they have never heard of, run by someone they cannot see, and they are deciding whether it is safe to hand over a card. Your returns policy and your reviews are the two things answering that question. Everything else on the page is decoration by comparison.
The returns policy is a sales page
It reads like legal text, so it gets written like legal text and buried in the footer. That is backwards. The returns policy is read most often by people who have not bought yet, and what they are looking for is permission to take a risk.
Write it so it can be understood in one pass:
- How long they have. A number of days from delivery. Longer than the legal minimum if you can afford it, because the extra days cost little and remove the hesitation.
- What condition it needs to be in. Unused, tags on, original packaging - whatever is true for what you sell.
- Who pays the postage. The honest answer, whatever it is. Customers forgive paid return postage. They do not forgive discovering it after the fact.
- How long the refund takes. In days, from when you receive it.
- What is excluded. Personalised items, perishables, opened hygiene products. Say so up front rather than in a dispute.
Then link it from the product page, not just the footer. The doubt happens at the moment of the add-to-cart, so the reassurance has to be there too.
In Webkio, returns are handled as a request against the original order rather than as an email thread, so the item, the buyer and the reason stay attached to the order they came from. The mechanics are in Coupons, reviews and returns.
Process the return like you want the second order
A return is not a lost sale. It is a customer who has just found out what happens when something goes wrong, and who is now deciding whether to risk it again.
That means speed matters more than the amount. A refund processed the day the parcel arrives buys goodwill that no discount code can. A refund that takes three weeks and two chasing emails loses a customer who would otherwise have bought four more times.
Two habits do most of the work. Acknowledge the request the day it comes in, even if the parcel has not arrived yet. And when you refund, say what you refunded and why, so there is nothing to query.
Reviews are what a small shop has instead of a brand
Nobody needs reviews to trust a household name. Everybody needs them to trust a shop they found on Saturday.
The value is not the average score. It is that a real person, with a name, in a comparable situation, bought this thing and said what happened. That is why a handful of specific reviews outperforms a hundred generic five-star ones, and why a shop with nothing but perfect scores reads as suspicious rather than excellent.
Reviews sit against the product itself, so they appear where the decision is being made rather than on a testimonials page nobody visits.
Ask at the right moment, and only once
Most shops never ask, then wonder why they have no reviews.
Ask after the customer has had the thing long enough to form an opinion. For most products that is a week or two after delivery, not the hour it shipped. Ask once. A second request is a nuisance, and a third turns a happy customer into an unsubscriber.
Make it specific. "How did you get on with it?" produces something a future buyer can use. "Please leave us a review" produces "Great, thanks".
Publish the bad ones
The instinct is to hide anything under four stars. Resist it, for a practical reason rather than an ethical one: buyers actively look for the negative reviews, and a shop that appears not to have any reads as a shop that deletes them.
A critical review with a calm, useful reply from the owner underneath is worth more than its absence. It demonstrates the thing the buyer is actually trying to establish - that someone is home, and that if this goes wrong a human will deal with it.
The exception is abuse and spam, which is moderation rather than editing, and every shop needs the ability to remove it.
What this adds up to
Neither of these is a growth tactic. They are the two places where a small shop either earns a stranger's trust or does not, and they cost nothing but attention.
If you are still setting the shop up, Set up your shop and Shop orders cover the plumbing, and How to Open an Online Store covers the wider picture. If you are weighing up whether to sell on your own site at all, the online store builder page lays out what that involves - and the pricing is a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of everything you sell.
FAQ
Does a generous returns policy cost more than it earns?
Usually not. The returns you would have had anyway still happen; what changes is the number of people who buy in the first place because the risk is off them.
When should I ask for a review?
Once, shortly after the thing has actually arrived and been used. Too early and they have nothing to say; too often and you become the shop that nags.
Should I publish bad reviews?
Yes. A page of nothing but five stars reads as filtered, and a well-answered three-star review does more for a hesitant buyer than another perfect one.