Avoid high refund rates: keep your inventory in sync

To avoid a high refund rate,
keep your inventory in sync

Hot weather, hot sales, and happy customers

About the only thing hotter than the weather this Summer has been the increase in sales on Bonanza. Whereas a normal Summer means sagging sales, this year has been unique, with sales and GMV surging (and setting new record highs) with every passing month. It is with this backdrop that we know we must be focused on ensuring all of these transactions result in happy buyers and word-of-mouth growth that benefits the entire selling community. 

Keeping out-of-stock refunds to a minimum is essential to that goal. When a customer receives a refund for an out-of-stock purchase, their impression of Bonanza is an unfavorable one. Finding something to buy has an air of excitement that comes with it. When this excitement is dashed by a refund before receiving the item, it creates a negative experience that buyers remember and avoid. Being a collective marketplace means that the refunds of one seller can result in lost sales for other sellers. This is what we seek to avoid as sales keep getting hotter.

Read on to learn more about how we track refund rates and what you can do to help keep buyers coming back again and again.

Tracking refund rates

Bonanza internally tracks the “refund rate” for each merchant. This is the number of refunds issued to customers, divided by the number of sales made in the same period. For example if you’ve made a total of 100 sales, but had to refund 3 of them, your refund rate would be 3% (pretty good!).

When a merchant’s refund rate gets too high, we've built systems to detect this and intervene to bring the refund rate back under 5%. If the problem continues, we will reach out to understand the situation in more detail, and see how we can help. If it persists after these efforts, we may be forced to put the booth on hold until the seller can work with us to better automate synchronization between their Bonanza store and their other channels.

To help track your refund performance, we've added a new section (visible only to you) at the top of your feedback page. It will look something like this:

As you'll note, we don't use your exact refund rate on this page, because we understand that offering refunds in the right situations is a cornerstone of ensuring happy buyers. Having some refunds is a natural part of doing business on the Internet (or off the Internet, for that matter). What we are focused on is the situations where refunding is a frequent and ongoing result of completed transactions in a store. This is where we must act to preserve the satisfaction of Bonanza shoppers.

"This I Promise You"*

In the past month, we have prioritized improvements to ensure that when your item sells on another marketplace, it gets automatically removed from stock here. We are making every effort to make this process Bonanza-simple for our sellers. What we ask of you is to join us in taking the steps necessary to ensure that stock is marked correctly on Bonanza. For example:

• If you imported your inventory from another marketplace: Be sure to turn on automatic sync to keep things up to date.
  • You'll find the importer settings under the Sell on Bonanza link at the top of every page.
  • Hot tip: If you were bit by the old sync bug that sometimes caused duplicate listings in your booth, you can visit your eBay sync page and clean out duplicate listings by clicking "Do a one-time purge of all non-active eBay items."
• If you imported your inventory from a CSV file: Be sure to get a fresh copy of the CSV and re-import frequently to keep a tight match between your Bonanza booth and your distributors’ inventory.
  • You'll find the "Import from inventory file" link under the Sell on Bonanza menu at the top of every page.
  • If you'd like to automatically upload your CSV file regularly, we can help make that happen. Email feedback -at- bonanza.com team with details on how you get your inventory file, and what tools you have available to automatically send it. We'll work with you to figure out the easiest way to get it uploading automatically.
• If you manage your inventory manually: Be sure to check your stock frequently and update your Bonanza listings and quantities appropriately.

We’re here to support you any way we can. If you have questions or concerns, or would like some help getting your inventory synchronized, please contact our friendly support team any time. We'll be listening for any ideas you may have on how we can best keep your Bonanza inventory in sync with minimal time spent on your end. 

Happy selling!

* This *NSYNC album isn't mine, it belongs to my little sister. I'm just, um, storing it for her.