Reserve items for exchange draft orders to prevent out-of-stock items during the exchange process and ensure a seamless experience for both you and your customers.
What Does it Mean to Reserve Items?
Reserving items is a powerful function that enables you to temporarily remove items from your inventory during the exchange process to prevent these items from going out of stock before you complete the exchange.
If the exchange draft order isn't released by the specified date and time, the reserved items are automatically restocked in your inventory.
This can incentivize customers to ship back the items before the reserved items get restocked, in order to avoid the reserved items being out of stock and the exchange being delayed.
Item reservation is particularly useful when dealing with exchange orders that aren’t immediately released. Instead of worrying about inventory shortages during exchanges, you can ensure that the items involved in an exchange are kept aside until the exchange order is finalized and the exchange draft order is released.
This feature is available as an add-on.
Capabilities
ReturnGO's reserve items feature makes the exchange process smoother:
- Set default timeframe
- Define the default number of days or months you want to reserve items.
- Customize per exchange policy rule
- Enable item reservation for specific exchange policy rules and set the reserve items timeframe according to the scenario covered by each policy rule.
- View returns by reservation expiration
- Filter your RMAs by order of expiration of item reservation.
How to Reserve Items
To enable and configure item reservation settings, first make sure you've added the add-on, then:
1. In your ReturnGO dashboard, go to Settings > Store Settings.2. In the Product and Variant Exchange Settings section, navigate to the Reserve Items Settings subsection and enable the feature.
- The average number of days it takes to approve pending RMAs.
- The average number of days it takes for customers to return items.
- The average amount of time to handle and inspect received shipments.
- The average amount of time it takes to release an exchange after the shipment has been inspected.
5. Apply item reservation to relevant policy rules - go to Settings > Return Policy, and edit the rule you want to apply it to.
6. Toggle the Reserve Items for Exchanges switch to enable this feature for the selected policy rule.
7. Configure the reservation settings for the specific policy rule according to your needs, taking into account the timeframes defined in the store settings.
What Happens When You Reserve Items
Return Portal
When you have enabled the option to reserve items, an icon will appear in the return portal on exchange policy rules with items reserved. An indication of the number of days the items will be reserved will be displayed in the fees section, with a $0 value.
Auto-exchange behavior remains the same, ensuring a smooth process even when reserving items.
Note: If a customer exchanges multiple items and chooses different policy rules with different item reservation timeframes, the longer timeframe will be used, as the item reservation applies to the entire exchange draft order and only one draft order is supported per RMA.
RMA Card
When a customer requests an exchange including item reservation, an icon in the RMAs table will indicate the reservation status for items in the exchange, with tooltips providing detailed information.
The RMA Card will display an icon indicating reserved items, along with the corresponding date and time of expiration.