Return Reason Analytics

The problem this kills

Returns are telling you something, and right now nobody is listening. The reasons sit in a help-desk export, a carrier portal, and a spreadsheet someone updates "when there's time." Each return looks like a one-off, so you refund it, restock it, and move on - and then the exact same sizing complaint or the exact same cracked-in-transit SKU shows up again next week.

The cost isn't the individual refund. It's that the root cause never gets fixed because nobody can see the pattern. The fix is sitting in your data: the same three SKUs driving "too small," one carrier driving most of your "damaged," a single supplier behind a wave of "wrong item." You just need something that adds it up and points at it.

What you'll build

A small internal web app - just for your team - that takes your return records, normalizes the messy free-text reasons into a clean set of reason codes, and shows you the top causes by reason, by SKU, and by carrier. It flags the SKUs and causes that are repeating or spiking, and it puts a real human gate in front of action: a manager reviews the flagged list, edits it, and approves it before anything becomes an official action item. When a cause trends upward, it emails an alert so you catch it early instead of at the quarterly review.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A guided build you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code) - no coding experience needed.
• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the plan has the agent ask about your current returns process, the systems and spreadsheets you pull from, your real reason codes and SKU naming, your typical and peak return volumes, and your messy edge cases - then it tailors the data model and every later step to your answers instead of dropping a generic template on you.
• A reason-code taxonomy and a normalizer that maps free-text reasons (and your carrier's codes) into clean, countable categories.
• The aggregation dashboard: returns rolled up by reason, SKU, and carrier, with the top repeating causes pushed to the top.
• A manager review-and-approve gate that turns flagged causes into an approved action list.
• Trend alerts by email when a cause spikes.
• A no-API fallback: import a CSV or Google Sheet today and export a clean action list - no integration required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own returns data.
• A full audit trail - who normalized what, who flagged it, who approved the action list, and when.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the problem list, a manager reviews and approves it, and only approved items become action items.
• Duplicate guards keyed on the RMA number so the same return can't be counted twice.

Who it's for

Operations and quality managers who own the returns or reverse-logistics process, and the merchandising folks who need to know which products and which lanes keep coming back. If you live in returns spreadsheets and you know there's a pattern you can't quite prove, this is for you.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.