The beauty of ecommerce is that you can run it from anywhere. You can be living in South Africa and yet drop shipping products in USA. You may have good relationships with vendors, distributors, manufacturers in China and other countries who drop ship straight to your customers in USA. Life is good – until that one customer contacts you and wants to return the product.
What do you do now? You want the customer to ship it straight back to China. Easier said than done. He has to make sure he buys the right postage with tracking so when it is delivered to the source in China or wherever, you would know and refund the customer. Doable but for most customers shipping overseas freaks them out. Any missteps and you would end up with negative feedback and backlash on social media or a chargeback on the credit card.
What to do? Is there a company that provides centralized returns management for drop shippers in USA? Yes there is. It is called Interloper.com.
Interloper.com by itself is an ecommerce company dealing in specialty computers. They have a warehouse and accounts with major shipping companies like UPS, FedEx and USPS. They manage returns for themselves and also for other drop shippers. Once you sign up with Interloper.com for Returns Management, they give you an address and an account #. Your customer send returns to them and they then pack, label and ship to your suppliers in China and other countries. They also maintain a ledger of what was received, when it was received, when it was shipped to supplier, postage cost and tracking information.
