Almost every ecommerce company in the world has spent the last decade making it easier to buy things. Hardly any of them spent that decade on what happens when you send something back.
That's the entire reason iF Returns exists, and it's a stranger business than it sounds.
Most brands treat a return as money already gone. The only questions remains are how fast, and how much it costs to get the item back. We look at that same moment and ask whether it has to end that way. A customer returning an item is a customer who's still here, still on that site, still holding a thing they bought from you. Make the alternative process genuinely easy and a good share of them would rather have a different size, a different colour, or something else entirely.
Maybe a bold claim to make, we turn 30 to 40 percent of what would have been refunds into exchanges and new purchases instead. That's the whole company in one number.
What it actually takes
Ecommerce, quick commerce, buy now pay later... I had spent my career on the buying side, so I assumed returns were checkout in reverse and the engineering would be small. It isn't a small system.
There's the portal a customer opens, which has to work in their language, in their country, under their brand's rules about what's returnable and for how long. There's the dashboard the brand's team lives in all day, chasing the ones that went wrong. There's a connection into whatever shop platform the brand runs on, Shopify or Salesforce or something they built themselves, so we know what was bought and can put a new order back into it. There's the carrier network, roughly twenty of them across Europe, each with their own idea of what a parcel is and what a label has to say. There are the emails and the tracking updates. And then the refund, which has to move real money, correctly, once.
More than 200 brands across Europe run on us. Salomon, Desigual, Miroglio, Champion, and a long list of names you'd recognize from a high street. All with different rules, all expecting it to feel like their own website.
The part that changed how I think
Buying is mostly a software event. You click, a payment authorizes, an email arrives. The physical world turns up later and it's someone else's problem.
A return is the opposite. A real object has to travel back, usually across a border. A warehouse has to open the box and decide whether it can be sold again. There's a legal deadline on the refund. And the whole time there's a person refreshing a page, wondering where their money is, already a bit annoyed at the brand. Our system touches all four but it controls none of them.
Which is why my idea of "done" got bigger here than anywhere else I've worked. A request succeeding isn't the thing. The failures I remember aren't crashes, they're the times everything worked exactly as written and was still useless to the one person it existed for.
And now with ReturnPro
ReturnPro handles the other end of all this. Once the parcel is back, somebody has to inspect it, grade it, restock it or resell it. They process more than 45 million units a year and have recovered over five billion dollars for retailers doing exactly that.
So the two halves fit. We're the front of the return, the part the customer touches and the part that decides whether the relationship continues. ReturnPro is what happens to the item afterwards, at a scale we haven't operated at. Galo, Marcello and Paul are staying on to run it, which tells you something about what ReturnPro thinks they're buying.
I don't have a tidy take on what that'll feel like day to day. More brands, more countries, more carriers, and a pile of problems nobody here has hit yet. That's the part I'm looking forward to.
Tomorrow the work looks the same as last week. Open the GitLab, find the requirements, implement or fix it. Just with a much bigger map around it now.
iF Returns is now a part of ReturnPro - in case if you wanna read the announcement → Click Here