Can I have different shipping policies depending on the product?

[liddy21]

Hi All, 

I am a drop shipper with a botique fashion store with products sourced from mainly two different suppliers/vendors. I am hitting a roadblock on deciding how to go about my policies page. Vendor and supplier both have different return policies making it hard to have a consistent one across my store. 

Would it be legally feasible to have a two part policy page that correspond to a particular product? For example, for one supplier I would only offer a 50% refund or something for purchases made so I do not lose money on shipping out the product. For the other, I would allow for a 14 no hassle-free returns policy. 

I would classify under each product whether it applies to policy A or policy B in my policies page, respective to the vendor. Is this legally feasible or would I need to have a consistent policy throughout my site? 

[JoesIdeas]

Yes, it's your business you can implement any policies you want, just make it clear in your documentation.

For "legally feasible" this depends on a lot of factors: you're location, the laws there, the type of products you sell, etc. I haven't heard of legal restrictions on refund policies. I would do some research on competitors and inspirational brands in your niche to see what successful businesses are doing. For example, I've seen companies use a restock fee, I've seen companies offer free returns but customer pays for shipping, I've seen free returns free shipping, etc.

You can decide what's right for your business then implement that. My advice (I ran a store for 7 years), start with a very flexible return policy to make customers feel comfortable doing business with you, then adjust it as needed, like if you get a bunch of returns and aren't able to resell the product, you would want to implement a harsher policy, but if you get a low % of returns (last I recall 20% was average for fashion industry, so lets say less than 10% is good), then it may be worth having the flexible returns policy because it increases conversion rate.