In accordance with the new right to return EU law, we have turned on the self-serve return request feature in Shopify. However, we have some items which have specific conditions they must meet before we can accept the return due to hygiene reasons.
Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t seem to have a way to select and approve only specific products in a return request and there are some sub-optimal work arounds for this.
Has anyone else experienced this same issue? What do you do in these situations?
Historically, customers have contacted us to request a return whereby we can then ask them if their products are unworn and still sealed in the original packaging. But this new system is already proving to make the entire process less efficient.
I haven’t used the Shopify feature yet, so I’m not sure on the specifics. Doesn’t the self-serve just notify both ends that a return has been requested? Couldn’t you then go through your regular routine?
The thing that helped me here was splitting the hygiene items into two cases. For anything that should never come back, set it as final sale / non-returnable in your return rules under Settings > Returns, so it never enters a self-serve request in the first place. That clears most of the approve-only-some problem. The ones that are returnable only if a condition is met, like unopened or seal intact, are the real gap. Native self-serve is all-or-nothing and can’t express a condition, so those still need the manual back-and-forth you described, or a returns app that does conditional rules per product. So it’s less about approving specific lines and more about keeping the no-return items out of the flow up front. How many of your SKUs are hard no-return vs conditional?