Latest / Talk Commerce / Beyond Borders Transforming E-commerce Returns with Katherine Lehman at Shop Talk
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:02.7) Welcome to this special Shop Talk episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Katherine Lehman, Lehman. Lehman. And Isaac Moray. And we are here at Shop Talk. Katherine, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role. One of your passions. Yes, so I am Katherine Lehman. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Return Bear and I'm with Return Bear because they are sitting at the unique intersection of two of my passions, which is shopping. So on the return side, we all buy a lot of stuff, but also the sustainability piece. So we're making returns more delightful for the customers. So we all like to send stuff back, more profitable for the retailers and then more sustainable for the planet. Isaac, do an introduction for yourself. Hey everybody, I'm Isaac Mori and I'm with Content Cucumber joining in on the podcast today. I'll be asking some questions and hopefully providing some insight to everything. And you're most famously named Efron Eel, right? Speaker 3 (01:03.118) More eel, yeah. I just saw a very cool More eel at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. It was a good experience. My name is actually Mori. A little different. Well, let's not get bogged down into that. Let's talk a little bit about return bear. So you mentioned sustainability, but in our green room you've also talked about the cross-border for returns, which has to be really complicated. Tell us a little bit about that. It is, and I think it's top of everyone's mind because of the tariff situations and everything that's going on right now on the cross-border piece. So Return Bearer is headquartered in Toronto and we work uniquely with Canada to US, US to UK, and we just launched in Australia as well. So it's a lot of those long voyages that make returns so hard to manage. And we have really excelled in the cross-border space because one of the things that makes cross-border difficult is It's really expensive. There's a lot of tariffs. There's a lot of duty drawbacks. There's things like that going on. And being able to figure all that out for yourself is really complicated. So it kind of limits your growth if you can't accept returns across those borders. So we've kind of solved that problem by having both the software side of the house, but also the actual logistics facilities. So we like to call ourselves a global 4PL to solve all that problems on the cross-border piece so that it's not as expensive to get your stuff back across those borders. Tell us a little bit about how you probably have to work with customs and do they penalize you for something that's already gone out once coming back and I would imagine there's a bunch of logistical paperwork that's involved in that. Speaker 1 (02:44.778) yeah, there's always a lot of that. But the interesting part about what we do is, so when you're sending something across border, you're paying the duties, paying the taxes, doing all that stuff. On the reverse logistics side, when you go to return it, nobody wants to ship it back to where it was. We work with largely fashion brands and there's a seasonality to it. So at any given time, 20 % of your inventory for a fashion brand is stuck in returns. Like, and it could be resellable. So if you have a shirt for St. Patrick's Day, for example, you only got about six weeks to sell that shirt and then it's out of here. So what we do is we actually forward fulfill. So if you ship something from the US to Canada, the Canada customer returns it, we verify the return, we call it verified, but we verify the return and then we will hold it and ship it to the next customer and just forward fulfill it. So you don't have to worry about the back and forth of sending it back across the border, you don't have to worry about the time delays and it cuts down on a lot of those return costs that are generated during that time. Yeah, that's a really good way to go about it. Is there anything that's more difficult than any other product in the cross-border items? Yeah, I think that we focus mainly with fashion brands. So shoes, apparel, jewelry, things that have a really high level of return. I think there's still a struggle around electronics and some of the heavier items and things like that because there's just more room for error, things to go wrong. We don't work with electronic companies and do bench testing and things like that. But through our partnership network, we're kind of the friendly bears because we work with everybody. And through our partnership network, we do partner with some people that can handle those types of So if we can't help you, we are quick to introduce you to someone who can. Speaker 2 (04:31.786) Have you seen anything in the space that like the $800 tariff thing, right? Like the cross border. And I think a lot of the Chinese shippers just expect you to keep it. They don't even want it back, right? Yes. Is that a common thing? And it sounds like you're helping to change that. Yeah, we really are trying to keep things out of landfills. So a lot of those companies, they will do a Just Keep It program or a Liquidate It program or things like that. So we've worked with partners in the past that how can we recycle that? How can we make it more sustainable? So we have opportunities. We like to resell stuff, right? We want to make sure that it's getting into the hands of somebody to use it. But if a company wants to liquidate, we have donate programs. We have programs that will make it sustainable. or refashion it into something else so that even if you are a company that doesn't want it back, we can still help you make it into a greener solution than just dumping it all in a landfill. What are you hoping to get out of Shop Talk this year? We're helping to meet brands that are really struggling with having a good customer experience around returns. It's the number one thing that can drive a customer away. And since you're paying so much on acquisition costs, like you want to keep your customers, you want to keep them happy. And returns is really a place where people feel that pain point, right? You send something back. And especially if you're sending it back, you know, to a vendor in the UK, you're waiting weeks and weeks for returns. You're like, where's my money? I set my stuff in. I don't know where it is. Speaker 1 (06:06.368) And the internet is full of reviews of just people talking very poorly about return processes. And it's damaging. It's damaging to the customer. So, or it's damaging to the company. So we're trying to really elevate these companies by offering them a better return solution. And it's not all on us, right? I talk about our partners a lot because if you already are happy with like your RMA solution, we integrate with almost everybody and we can work with if you're on loop or globally or some other part of it, we can integrate with all those solutions and be part of the puzzle that solves that problem and fill in the gaps that you're missing, or if you don't have return solutioning at all, we are the complete end-to-end. We used to say from pixels to parcels, we don't say that anymore, but from the beginning all the way to the forward fulfillment, we can heal every gap in between. Isaac, have you ever thought about not ordering something because it comes from out of the country? Absolutely, I've had some long waits to get stuff that I've ordered and also I used to live in Mexico City and I remember once trying to ship a microphone from Mexico back to the US that I wanted and boy did that take a long time to get there and that's just Mexico so I could imagine you know Australia or the UK being quite a bit longer to get your product or to get your money back after you return something. Speaker 1 (07:26.574) I once shipped something from Spain to Pittsburgh and I had no idea where it was. I had no idea when it was going to get there. And it was like this big question mark. Like, is it in the air? Is it in the ocean? Is it somewhere? And I can't imagine being a consumer having to wait a month for a return refund. Like, especially if it's something big. Like, say you bought a really expensive evening gown or a dress or something like that. You send it back to this beautiful vendor up in the UK and not getting that money back, knowing you have to go or something else. I mean, that's not a great customer experience. None of us would like that. So I love the idea of keeping it in the country where it's going and forwarding it on to the next customer. That's awesome for the customer side and for the environment. Are there situations where items have to get shipped back overseas? And in those cases, how do you guys, like, how do you solve that for both the customer and the company? Yeah, that's an area that we shine. So sometimes you just want it all back, right? And we do cross border consolidation. So if you as the merchant were to send back that item individually every time it was returned, you're paying a shipping label every single time, right? So you're paying $20 to ship it back, $20 to ship it back, $20 to ship it back. 60 % of the savings that we offer are through the cross border consoles. So say you want all your stuff back, we will consolidate it into one shipment, send it once, then it's one shipment. So cutting down on the carbon footprint. It's cutting down on the cost and it's cutting down on how long it's gonna take you to get that and you know where your stuff is a lot of companies really like that because consumers are doing what they call batch buying right, so you go online and you buy six pairs of jeans and you know six different sizes because you don't know how they're gonna fit and then you keep one and send the rest back and Those are perfectly fine. You just didn't some cases. You didn't even try them on because the first pair fit We can resell that for you or we can send it all back in Speaker 1 (09:21.314) inventory together, which is really powerful. So this year at Shop Talk, AI has been the buzz, agentic has been the buzz. Is there any buzz words that are coming up in the returns business? I don't even think it's a buzzword. It's really the customer experience. Like, to put it bluntly, how do we not piss off our customers? You know, how do we give them what they want and make sure that, you know, when they're bogging down our customer success people with returns, how do we service them and make it a really good experience? I'd love to say that AI is really in here, but we still do everything by hand. We reduce fraud by 100 % when people use us. So you're not getting stuff back because we verify with people, not with AI. So I'm sure it's going to make its way into our software in the future, but right now we're just, we're doing it the old-fashioned way. We all went on the morning 5k this morning we did and we we talked just briefly about some of the customer journey that a After they've done a return or after they've submitted an RMA How do you advise brands in? Enhancing that customer journey and even using that customer journey to sell more products to the client who's returned something Speaker 1 (10:40.46) Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity for that when you're returning something like are you exchanging it? Are you returning it for credit? A lot of times we can give that revenue back to the merchants because when they're returning something, we give them, you know, the incentive to keep it as store credit or to purchase something else. And a lot of customers want that. They already spent that money. So it's not necessarily like they want it back. They want to make sure that they're getting something out of it. So if there's a little extra something you can offer them, like, hey, turn this into store credit for an extra 10%. A lot of consumers really like that. And they will take advantage of that. Is there anything that's coming up for this holiday season? We're probably six months away now, or maybe a little bit more to the Black Friday. Is there anything that we should be looking for when we're seeing something new this fall from the returns business? I think, well, we just opened up our facility in Australia. So it's nice to have additional coverage, because that's $23 billion in consumerism over in that area. But I would say to any brand looking to enhance your returns ahead of time, get started now, because it gives you time to refine the process before that crunch. And I think so many brands try to do so much in that crunch time of Q3, right before the season happens. And then they just run out of time, right? And then the customers suffer. So figure it out now so that you have it in place because a lot of those gifts get returned. A lot of those items get returned. know, the gift receipts are a thing. So when people are batch buying or buying large numbers of items, it's important to have that return side figured out because you know that stuff is coming back. There's always stuff coming back. Speaker 2 (12:29.634) Yeah, Catherine, we have a few minutes left and at the end of the podcast, I get everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? figure out your return stuff. We're all consumers out here. We all love to buy stuff. And I have had the privilege of working with many brands and many tech companies of the last several decades of my career. And I came to work with Return Bear because we're actually doing something different. We are not salesy people. We really want to help the environment. We want to help brands. And I really believe in the work that we're doing. So we can really help you solve your return problems. And if we can't, we can tell you who can. That's perfect. Catherine Layman is the CMO at Return Bear. Thank you so much for being here. Isaac Moray is with Content Cucumber. He's kind of a big deal. Speaker 3 (13:20.152) Well, thanks, y'all.