Return Rate Trend

Return Rate Trend shows whether your returns are getting better or worse. It gives the share of the units sold in each period that customers returned.

How It’s Calculated

The report counts units, not money. The cards at the top show Units Sold (settled), Units Returned and Return Rate for the date range. They count only periods whose returns have settled.

The chart draws the Return Rate of each period.

Each row of the table is one period. The length of the date range sets how long a period is:

• 3 days or less: one row per hour
• Up to 93 days: one row per day
• Longer: one row per month

The columns are:

• Units Sold (covered): the units sold on orders placed in the period.
• Units Returned: the units from those orders that were refunded.
• Return Rate: Units Returned divided by Units Sold (covered). A period with no units shows a dash.
• Settled: Settled once the whole period ended at least 90 days ago. Still Settling before that.

Each period is the orders placed in it. A return is counted against the order it came from, not the day of the refund. So the return rate for June is the share of the units sold in June that came back, whenever they came back.

The data doesn’t record refund dates for individual units.

Settling

Returns take about 90 days to arrive. A period that’s newer than that has a return rate that’s too low for now, and it rises as returns land.

The chart draws Still Settling periods as a dashed line. The cards and the totals row leave them out, so they only quote periods that are done. Read the dashed part as a lower bound.

The Return Rate card shows a dash when the settled periods hold fewer than 10 units. A single period has no such minimum, so a period with only a few units can show a swing that means little.

What Counts

• Orders count on the day they were processed, in your store’s time zone.
• Canceled orders, and orders whose payment was voided or expired, are left out.
• Units canceled from an order that wasn’t fully canceled count as returned, because the data can’t tell the two apart.
• Order lines that don’t record whether they were returned are left out of both numbers.
• Sales Channel, Segment and Filters narrow the report. There’s no comparison period.

What Good Looks Like

Your own return rate depends on what you sell. Clothing and shoes come back more than a refill or a candle, so judge the trend, not the level.

• The settled part of the line is flat or falling. A rising line means more of what you sell is coming back.
• A step up after a change. A new supplier, a new product, a different carrier or a change in your return policy can move the line. Look at the periods around the date.

What to Do About It

• Find which products drive it. Product Return & Kept Rate breaks the rate down by product, variant, SKU, vendor, collection or tag.
• See what it costs. Refund Profit Impact shows what refunds cost your profit.
• Mark the change. Add an annotation for the day you changed supplier, policy or packaging. It shows on the chart, so you can read the rate against it later.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

• Return Rate Trend: open Reports and look under Returns.
• Product Return & Kept Rate: which products come back.
• Refunds Processed: refund money by the day it was refunded.