A return request at midnight:
answered before you wake up
A return request sits in a shared inbox for two days while a manager works out which policy applies and whether the item is even eligible. Meanwhile nobody knows what to tell a customer who is already annoyed. We build an agent that reads the request, checks it against your policy and order data, and prepares the resolution so a human only has to approve it.
Why a return request never arrives as a clean case
A return request almost never arrives as a clean case. It shows up as a half-finished sentence in a chat, a reply buried in an email thread, or a message on a marketplace. That marketplace often has its own rules about who pays for shipping. Someone on the team has to read it, find the original order, and check whether the item still qualifies under policy. Most teams give themselves a 14 to 30 day window, with exceptions for damaged goods, final sale items and promotional bundles. Then they decide between a refund, a replacement or store credit. Industry support numbers commonly put the average handling time for a single return case at 10 to 20 minutes, once everything is found. That is before the back and forth with a customer who filled in the form wrong.
Volume makes the real problem worse, not the complexity. A store moving a few hundred orders a day can generate enough returns that the queue never actually hits zero. Cases get triaged by whoever is loudest, rather than by how clear-cut they are. Easy, obviously-eligible returns wait behind messy edge cases that need a manager’s judgment anyway, and the customer experience suffers equally on both.
What the agent reads, checks and drafts
Reads the return request wherever it lands, pulling the order, the product, the purchase date and the stated reason from email, chat or marketplace messaging into one case.
Checks eligibility against your actual written policy. It applies the time window, the exceptions and the channel-specific rules, instead of a generic rule of thumb. A marketplace return often follows that platform’s policy, not yours.
Drafts the resolution: refund, replacement, store credit or a policy-based decline, with the reasoning spelled out so a reviewer can approve it in one read.
Checks stock before promising a replacement, so the agent never offers to send an item that is not actually available.
Flags abuse patterns. A customer with an unusually high return rate gets flagged. So does a repeated claim of “item not received” on the same route. A person looks at it before the next request from that account is auto-approved.
Sends status updates to the customer once a resolution is approved. It also compiles a weekly summary of return reasons by product, so a pattern, a sizing issue, a packaging problem, gets fixed at the source.
What stays with humans
The agent prepares the case. It does not move money. Every refund, replacement or store credit above a threshold you set goes to a person before anything is issued. So does every exception to policy, and every case flagged as possible abuse. Decisions that touch your relationship with a marketplace, a dispute escalation, a seller-rating risk, always route to a human. A reviewer can override the agent’s recommendation with one click, which also feeds back into tuning the rules.
How we keep a bad call from shipping
A dry-run period has the agent draft resolutions into a review queue instead of acting on them. Your team checks its judgment against real return cases before anything ships automatically. After that, every decision logs the policy clause and order detail behind it. A value threshold keeps larger refunds in front of a human no matter how confident the agent is. Rate limits stop a sudden spike of auto-approvals from one account or one product, and a kill switch pulls the agent off any channel instantly.
Price and timeline
| Package | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Single automation | from $1,000 | One store, one written policy, one or two intake channels |
| Department package | from $2,500 | Returns plus other support, fulfilment and loyalty automations under one review queue |
5 to 10 days covers turning your policy into rules the agent can check, connecting order and stock data, and the dry-run review period.
Related
Pairs with order fulfilment and routing, and with fraud and anomaly alerts for the abuse-pattern side. Loyalty and referral programs connects too, since a store-credit resolution often feeds the same balance. Part of automation of everything digital and built the way we build AI agents for our own products. The review discipline behind this comes from projects where refunds and credits were modelled end to end. The multi-vendor marketplace platform has Stripe and crypto refunds built in. Our own ProBay marketplace was verified against hundreds of orders with zero below cost.
Tell us your policy and your return volume and we will send back a fixed price and a plan for the first week: get in touch.
Tired of doing this by hand? We can take the whole routine off your team, not only this step: Routine takeover, from $400 →
FAQ
How much does a returns automation agent cost?
A single-channel setup, one store and one written policy, starts from $1,000. A department package covering returns plus other support and fulfilment automations starts from $2,500, priced once we know your return volume and channels.
How long does it take to go live?
5 to 10 days. That covers writing your policy into rules the agent can check against, and connecting your order and stock systems. Then a dry-run period, where the agent drafts resolutions a human reviews before any are sent automatically.
Which tools does it connect to?
Your store backend (Shopify, WooCommerce or similar) for order and stock data, and your support inbox or helpdesk. Marketplace messaging too, where you sell on Shopee, Lazada or similar platforms, plus your payment provider for the actual refund execution.
What if the agent approves a return it shouldn't have?
It drafts a resolution. It does not issue money on its own. Every refund, replacement or store credit above a threshold you set waits for a human click. The agent explains which policy clause and which order detail led to its recommendation, so a reviewer can check it in seconds.
Is customer and order data safe?
The agent reads only the order and customer records needed to process the specific request in front of it, and runs under your existing store and payment permissions. We do not retain customer data outside the processing pipeline. Access can be revoked at any time.