Imagine setting up a dropshipping store, getting your first sale, only for the delivery to fail because your customer wasn’t around to pick up the product or mistakenly gave the wrong address. What do you do? Well, that’s what we will discuss in this article.
If you ordered a product from a reputable online retailer and put the wrong address, what remedies would you expect?
Most reputable e-commerce delivery services like Amazon, Fedex and USPS, usually allow for order cancellation and rerouting.
This flexibility creates a good customer experience and builds customer loyalty.
What should you do if the product have the wrong address but haven’t been shipped yet
When an order fails as a fault of the customer putting the wrong address, it’s more popular to give the customer the ability to change the delivery location as long as the order hasn’t been shipped yet.
What should you do if the product have the wrong address and has been shipped
If the order has been shipped, it is a more popular e-commerce practice, to give your customers the ability to cancel the order and place it again with the correct address then you can charge a rerouting fee.
If you’re a dropshipping ecommerce business, you should first seek to understand the return and refund policy of your Supplier, know if they allow cancellation and rerouting of orders then you can use theirs as a benchmark to decide whether to offer order cancellation and rerouting.
What should you do if the product has already been delivered at the wrong address?
If the product has already been delivered at the wrong address, In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provides that the recipient of the unordered product has the legal right to keep it as a free gift and Sellers are not allowed to request payment of an unordered product. Consumers are also not obligated to even inform the seller that a product was delivered wrongly at their address.
Logistics companies like the USPS encourages recipients of an unordered product to label it “Return to sender” so that USPS can return it back to the sender for free.
So as an e-commerce merchant, if you notice that a product has been delivered at the wrong address, you can either hope that the recipient will ask for it to be returned back to the sender or contact your supplier or courier to ask them to try to retrieve the item from the recipient.
Bear in mind that as per the United States FCT rules, the receipt of an unordered item can legally decide to keep it, therefor do not promise your customers that you can retrieve the product for them once it has already been delivered at the wrong address.
