If you’re a seller on Flipkart, you know that visibility is crucial to your sales. Recently, however, many sellers have noticed that their product visibility is dropping due to high return rates. This situation is frustrating, especially when the returns are categorized as Return to Origin (RTO), where the product is returned without ever being delivered to the customer. This practice by Flipkart seems unfair, and here’s why.
High Return Rates: The Problem
E-commerce platforms like Flipkart closely monitor return rates as they can signal potential problems with a product, such as poor quality or misleading descriptions. When a product has a high return rate, Flipkart may reduce its visibility to protect customers from potentially bad experiences. While this makes sense when returns are due to customer complaints, it becomes problematic when returns are RTO-based.
Understanding RTO-Based Returns
RTO, or Return to Origin, happens when a product is returned to the seller without reaching the customer. Reasons for this can vary: incorrect addresses, customers not being available, or refusal to accept the product. The key point is that these returns occur without the customer seeing or using the product. So, judging the quality of a product based on RTO rates is neither accurate nor fair.
Why This is Unfair to Sellers
Penalizing products due to RTO returns creates several problems for sellers:
- Misleading Quality Indicators: Since RTO returns do not reflect the actual quality of the product, using them to reduce visibility can unfairly damage a product’s reputation.
- Sales Impact: Lower visibility means fewer sales. Sellers can lose significant revenue, even if their products are of high quality, because of factors outside their control.
- Inability to Address Issues: Without customer feedback, sellers can’t identify or fix the real problems. RTO returns don’t provide insights into what might be wrong with the product or listing.
A Call for Fairer Assessment
Flipkart needs to consider more than just return rates, especially RTO returns, when assessing the quality of a listing. Here are a few suggestions for a fairer approach:
- Customer Feedback: Actual reviews and feedback from customers who have received and used the product should be more heavily weighted in quality assessments.
- Detailed Return Analysis: Flipkart should differentiate between returns due to product issues and those due to logistical problems.
- Seller Engagement: Working with sellers to understand why RTO returns are happening can help address the root causes more effectively.
Conclusion
Flipkart’s aim to maintain high standards and protect customers is commendable. However, the current practice of reducing visibility based on high return rates, particularly RTO-based returns, is unfair to many sellers. A more balanced approach that considers real customer feedback and distinguishes between different types of returns would be better for everyone involved. This way, high-quality products can get the visibility they deserve, and the marketplace can be fairer for all sellers
