With Happy Returns, Nogin retains revenue and reduces service costs, saving $1 million
Challenge
Nogin is the leading end-to-end outsource e-commerce solution, delivering cutting-edge technology, talent, and tactics for brand leaders that need to optimize operations, maximize growth and reduce expenses, including returns costs.
Solution
The company turned to Happy Returns to streamline returns and exchanges—enabling Nogin's clients to save $1 million in the first year from revenue retention and reduced customer service volumes.
Benefits
$1 million in overall savings in year one
Decreased customer service contacts
Greater customer satisfaction and loyalty
Patent-pending fraud mitigation at drop-off
Nogin is the leader in Commerce-as-a-Service, offering a complete, outsourced e-commerce solution that combines cutting-edge technology, specialized talent, and strategic tactics for D2C and B2B brands. Trusted by major brands like Bebe, Hurley, Justice, and Scotch & Soda, Nogin manages all facets of e-commerce operations.
Central to Nogin's offering is its Intelligent Commerce technology, which enhances Shopify Plus and best-in-class apps with real-time data extraction, transforming raw data into actionable insights. These insights enable businesses to anticipate market trends, optimize inventory, and engage customers more effectively.
Nogin also fulfills essential staffing and infrastructure needs, providing experts in key areas like store operations, performance marketing, retention, CRO, creative, customer service, and more. This allows brands to scale operations with less risk, reduce overhead, and improve ROI efficiently - all with zero upfront costs.
The Challenge
Returns and reverse logistics is a key pain point that Nogin aims to optimize. According to the National Retail Federation, the average return rate today is 14.5%. "For women's apparel, the rate is even higher," says Anh Vu-Lieberman, SVP of CRM, SEO and Personalization at Nogin. "For denim, it’s 23% to 25%; dresses, it’s 30% to 40%. And for the highest-priced dresses, the figure can reach 50% to 60%. That has an enormous impact."
The Opportunity
Studies show that customers are more loyal to stores that offer convenient, in-person returns. Approximately 90%¹ of customers avoid retailers that only offer mail-in returns, and those customers are less likely to buy from a retailer after a bad return experience.
Nogin came to Happy Returns to provide an easier, faster way to manage its customers' returns operations. As a leader in enterprise apparel and footwear returns, Happy Returns provides Nogin and its clients fast and easy returns at its nearly 10,000 nationwide Return Bar locations, including The UPS Store®, Ulta Beauty, Petco and Staples.
“Happy Returns streamlines the process, making it incredibly easy and hassle-free for our brands and their customers—enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.”
— Anh Vu-Lieberman, SVP of CRM, SEO and Personalization, Nogin
The Solution
With Happy Returns, Nogin seamlessly integrated its returns process across multiple brands, enabling their clients to enjoy a simplified returns process with:
box-free, label-free return drop-off and instantly-initiated refunds and exchanges at nearly 10,000 locations, including 5,000 The UPS Store® retail locations
patent-pending fraud detection and prevention at drop-off, and
advanced data and analytics in a merchant dashboard.
To-date, approximately 81% of Nogin clients' shoppers choose to get QR codes online and return items at a Return Bar® location vs. using a traditional mail option.
“We’ve saved nearly $1 million for our clients in the first year, thanks to revenue retention via exchanges and $500,000 in reduced customer service costs.”
— Anh Vu-Lieberman, SVP of CRM, SEO and Personalization, Nogin
Happy Returns' ability to verify returns and instantly initiate refunds greatly reduced those 'Where is my refund?' calls that are time-consuming for retailers. Additional benefits include converting more returns into revenue-retaining exchanges through Happy Returns' Return & Exchange Portal.
The Benefits
Increased Revenue and Decreased Customer Support Costs
Happy returns helped Nogin convert more returns into exchanges and reduce customer service contact volume. This resulted in $500K in customer service savings, and nearly $1M in total savings within the first year after launch.
More satisfied customers
Handling returns in-person at Happy Returns' nearly 10,000 Return Bar locations and instantly initiating refunds fosters greater customer satisfaction for Nogin's portfolio clients, contributing to increased loyalty and sales and an average Net Promoter Score of 82.²
Patent-pending fraud mitigation at drop-off
Every returned item dropped off at a Return Bar® location is scanned and verified to ensure it matches the return request, helping mitigate return fraud.
For more
If you'd like to know more about Nogin's success with Happy Returns and how the process can deliver similar results for your brand, please reach out for a free demo.
At a glance
Customer: Nogin
Category: Commerce-as-a-Service
Employees: 100-500
Ecommerce: Headless and works with Shopify Plus platform
ERP solution: Custom
Warehouse or Various: 3PL solution
Sources:
¹TRC, commissioned by Happy Returns, September 2023. An electronic survey conducted by TRC via anonymous panel through Forsta across 2,000 U.S. consumers of 18+ age fielded in mid-August 2023. (n=2000).
²Source: Happy Returns internal data, 2024.