You paid to ship them and you will pay to have them returned, and the one thing that would have caught most of it is a question nobody asked.
For D2C brands, Shopify and WooCommerce stores, Instagram sellers — anybody shipping cash on delivery.
Seven of those twenty-four cancel when asked, and asking also catches the wrong addresses — which is most of the rest. Cancelling before a parcel ships costs nothing at all.
Two buttons, sent within minutes of the order. The ones who never answer are the parcels that come back — and now you find out while it is still on the shelf.
A small discount to pay now — most stores use 5%. Somebody who has paid does not refuse the parcel, and the discount costs less than one return.
One message within the hour, while they still remember what was in it. Offer help rather than a discount — most abandoned carts are a question, not a price objection.
Six weeks after something that runs out. They already bought it, already liked it, and simply forgot — which makes this the best-performing message in the whole product.
Order placed, packed, shipped with tracking, delivered, and a line asking whether it was fine. Straight out of Shopify or WooCommerce, without anybody opening the dashboard.
Story replies, comment replies and DMs land beside the WhatsApp conversations, with the same assignment and the same notes — so an Instagram seller stops running two apps and losing half the messages in one of them.