Retiring 340 Products Broke a Retailer's Returns Process

A builders' merchant retired about 340 slow-selling products last autumn by marking them inactive in its system. That single flag also removed them from the returns search, so staff could not find items customers brought back. Many returns were logged under a miscellaneous code and refunded without being linked to the original sale. Over six weeks this produced 610 such returns worth about £38,000, against a normal monthly figure of around a dozen. The company fixed the issue by splitting retirement into separate dates for buying, selling and returns, then manually matching about 500 returns back to products.