When Betsie Larkin launched Honeylove back in 2018, she opted to use a manual returns management platform while the company was gaining traction. Fortunately, Honeylove’s early growth quickly surfaced a need for the company to seek time and cost efficiencies, and exploit every opportunity to collect customer feedback across their business, including returns.
Enter Return Rabbit — an automated returns management solution that prioritizes providing a great customer experience, winning exchanges, arming merchants with analytics and insights to improve marketing and product quality. Since then, Return Rabbit has proved to be just what what Betsie and the team at Honeylove has needed in a returns platform.
The Challenge
A dynamic returns portal with automation tools and actionable insights
Honeylove’s experience with their first return management platform left a lot to be desired as it lacked automation, exchange functionality, and provided only minimal insights. So when Betsie set out to improve the company’s post-purchase experience in 2020, she knew she needed a returns solution that would enable her team to accelerate their learning curve, drive loyalty and revenue retention through exchanges, and operate efficiently through automation.
The challenge facing Honeylove was how to easily improve the post purchase experience, starting with returns. By better understanding return intent, Honeylove could aim to convert more returns to exchanges, save money on customer support, and leverage customer data to continually improve their product offerings.
The manual processes, lack of exchange functionalities, and minimal analytics didn’t give the team the insights they needed to improve their products which resulted in high return rates. To combat this, Honeylove chose Return Rabbit as their returns management solution to automate their processes, drive exchanges, provide actionable insights, and so much more.
Results
Measurable ROI on Returns
Honeylove’s return rate tends to float around the industry average.
In 2021, their order volume had grown enough such that their returns topped 100K items. They retained over $3M in revenue with Return Rabbit by converting over 40,000 returns into exchanges. To top that off, shopper satisfaction with the returns process led to a 112% increase in upselling during the return process which translates into stronger loyalty shopping from happy customers. How do you like them carrots!
Increase in Upsell Revenue
Customer Support Savings Through Self-Service Portal
To accomplish their service and ease of use objectives, the team at Honeylove has fully customized their self-service returns portal and fully automated every step of their returns process from generating labels, to placing exchange orders, to updating inventory, and more.
With happy shoppers who have fewer reasons to call or email, and automation of time-intensive customer service tasks, Honeylove was able to save to save the time equivalent of 15 full-time employees in 2021.
Automating 150K+ Returns Saved Cost of Over 15 Employees
“Diving into specific return reasons has really allowed us to make improvements to our products faster. It’s really a treasure trove of information that we can use to be smarter about how we run our business.”
TREVOR HUMPHREY
CX at Honeylove
“Our previous returns management platform was restrictive and, frankly, pretty generic. The reporting and data features were substandard and exchange options were very limited. But with Return Rabbit, we haven’t run into those issues. There’s a great amount of flexibility within the portal itself that’s made the return process a lot easier to navigate. Plus we’re retaining more revenue by converting more returns into exchanges!”
LENA SONG
Head of Operations at Honeylove
Customized Return Reasons Improved Product Quality
The team at Honeylove obsesses over providing their shoppers with high-quality products. Nevertheless, and even after meticulous testing, the product will not be perfect for all of the thousands of shoppers who make a purchase. The team at Honeylove sees returns as an opportunity to learn.
To ensure that each product can be improved in a timely manner, Honeylove turned to Return Rabbit’s product specific return reasons feature to understand why each product was being returned.
Customizable product specific return reasons and subreasons allows Honeylove to collect feedback on what elements of the product that aren’t meeting shopper expectations. Whether a bra band is too big or the legs of the SuperPower Short are too tight, anything is possible. A cross-functional team of garment designers, experience manages, and operations reviews return reason data on a monthly basis to identify shifts in trends and to formulate action plans to improve various elements of their business.
At the end of the day, when customers feel heard, they come back and continue to shop with your brand—and that proved true with Honeylove. In 2021, Honeylove’s returning customer rate increased by 29% from the previous year.
Honeylove saw a 179% increase in total sales in 2021 from the previous year and a 163% increase in orders. By listening to their customers and utilizing product feedback, the team at Honeylove has been able to accelerate their learning curve and continuously deliver enviable year-over-year growth.
Serving Women with Data-Driven Clothing
Honeylove’s goal is to embolden women of all shapes and sizes through high-quality clothing and shapewear that can be worn with pride. Their commitment to quality necessitates collecting and taking action on data and customer feedback. Return Rabbit’s value-based exchange-first platform automatically helps Honeylove customers find the right product in the right size to reduce returns, incentivize exchanges, and optimize the post purchase experience.
“Shapewear isn’t something that women need, but it can help us to feel more confident when we step into a room. Our driving force when we create a garment is to fill a need that our customers have voiced. Customer feedback is at the heart of all product decisions, so having unique return reasons and sub reasons for each product has allowed us to act faster, and it makes our customers feel heard.”
Betsie Larkin
Founder and CEO of Honeylove
Returns Automation is Hare-Raisingly Easy.
Return Rabbit’s revenue-focused, data-driven technology makes the entire returns management process simple for Shopify merchants and their shoppers. Fast to launch and easy to use, Return Rabbit serves large and small merchants alike with robust functionality and turnkey solutions. Returns management is often viewed as a cost center for eCommerce brands, but we’re here to reinvent the wheel. With Return Rabbit’s proprietary technology, now returns management is a revenue-driving machine. Start your free trial today.
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Data referenced in this case study are from 2021, provided by Honeylove as well as from Return Rabbit’s platform analytics.
