A lot of valuable time and effort of your store’s sales staff is spent on attending customers who wish to exchange or return products.
Small and big retailers often have to set up separate return and exchange counters, so that their regular purchase checkout counters are not crowded with customers who are not generating new value for the store.
One way to reduce on return and exchange processing time and to avoid spending on setting up a separate counter for the same is to employ a POS software that works efficiently. Loyera’s free POS billing software helps process product returns with ease.
In this article, we will discuss:
1. How to use Loyera to process product returns
2. Benefits of using Loyalty points instead of refunding cash
3. How to process product exchange
How to easily process product returns with Loyera POS
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to process product returns with Loyera POS.
Step 1: Open order history
This section is a log of all orders purchased with you. In the order management section of Loyera POS software, go to Order History. Here, you will see a log of all orders processed at the store with customer’s name, date, time, receipt number, and order status.
Step 2: Search for customer’s order
This section has smart search filters that let you find a customer’s order. Search for the order you are looking for by Customer name, Receipt number, Date, etc. This helps you easily located the order on which the return transaction is to be processed.
Step 3: Open customer order
Open the relevant customer order to see a summary of the products and price details of the order purchased by the customers. Here, you can choose the product that needs to be returned, and also see the price that was paid for it.
Step 4: Return product
Click on Return product on the top right of the screen. This will reveal checkboxes next to all the products that were purchased by the customer. You can select the product that is being returned and choose the quantity being returned.
Step 5: Set return price of product
When you choose the return quantity, the return price box gets filled by default with the amount paid by the customer to purchase the item. You can leave the price as it is or change the refund amount to another amount, as per your return policy.
Step 6: Refund amount mode
Click on Refund after setting return quantity and price. Under Price details on the right side of the screen, you will be asked to choose between Cash refund or conversion of refund amount into loyalty points. You can choose to refund as per your policy or customers’ preference.
Step 7: See refund summary
After the refund transaction is complete, you can see the refunded products and refunded amount in the order page of that customer. This helps you keep track of who returned what. It also helps you keep track of the net revenue earned at the store.
Loyera POS is designed to continuously generate value for businesses and customers. For example, its features that help in quick returns and conversion of refund amount into loyalty points help businesses save valuable time of the sales staff and move checkout queues faster.
Its features also help customers process transactions easily and have a hassle-free product return experience.
Benefits of using loyalty points during product return
Loyalty rewards software integration of Loyera helps customers easily choose to convert their refund amount into loyalty points that helps your store and customers achieve the following benefits:
Customer retention
Even though the customer is returning products, when they get refund in loyalty points, they return to the store to purchase again for the same or a higher amount. This helps in bringing customer back to the store, and may also increase their lifetime value.
Quick return
When the refund amount is converted into loyalty points, sales staff at point of sale does not have to find the exact amount of cash to return to the customer. As the refund amount is converted into reward points by just clicking on a toggle button, it saves time in completing the Return transaction.
Easy payment in future
As after the return is processed with loyalty points, customers are able to use those points in future to make purchases. When they do so, the sales staff is able to quickly process the sale, as they do not have to receive fresh payment from the customers and can process the order with the loyalty points of the customers.
Larger baskets of goods sold
When a customer uses loyalty points to make a purchase, they tend to purchase more than the value of loyalty points, as they have to pay only a fraction of the bill at that time and the rest is covered by the loyalty points they accumulated because of their past product returns.
How to exchange products with Loyera POS
In this section, we will show how to attend a customers who wants to purchase a new item in exchange for an item they wish to return.
There are three scenarios when it comes to exchange—item(s) to be purchased is of the same, lower or higher value than the item(s) returned.
Here’re the steps that you need to carry out while exchanging products, keeping all three scenarios of product value in mind.
Carry out product return
When a customer wishes to exchange a product for something else, the first step to do is to use the steps in the first section of this article to process Return of the item that the customer wishes to give back. This can be done easily with the help of intuitive Loyera POS features.
Go to order history, search for customer’s past order when they purchased the product in question, and return the product. The return can be completed with cash or loyalty reward points.
Give loyalty points instead of cash
While concluding the product return initiated in the previous step, do not refund the full amount in cash for the product returned. Here, if the product to be purchased is of the same value or higher value as the product returned, then convert the full refund amount into customer loyalty points.
However, if the product to be purchased is of lower value than that of the product returned, then you can partially convert the refund amount into loyalty points.
Use loyalty points to carry out a new purchase transaction
Once the product to be returned has been processed and loyalty points are added to customer’s loyalty point account, then you can enable the customer to purchase the new product using those points. This helps in minimizing cash transactions carried out at return and checkout counters.
Customers can simply pay for the new product using the loyalty points they added in their account while returning the previous product. This completes the product exchange.
Issue a new receipt for the purchased product
After the new product’s exchange is complete, issue the purchase receipt for the product that is just purchased. This receipt will be treated as a new order and will carry a new receipt number. In case the customer wishes to return or exchange this product, this receipt will be considered as the purchase receipt for the item.
The receipts issued using Loyera POS carries balance of customer’s loyalty points that encourage them to visit your store again in the future.
In this manner, you can use Loyera’s free POS billing software and Loyalty rewards software to carry out smooth and simple exchange and returns at your stores.