How Canada Pooch Reduced Refunds by 60%
Key Insights
As a leader in pet apparel, Canada Pooch needed to address three costly return challenges: products coming back worn and unsellable, skyrocketing return label fees, and an over-reliance on refunds.
By integrating Frate’s AI image verification, Canada Pooch completely eliminated worn returns, ensuring only resellable items were accepted. Meanwhile, their new full-catalog exchange system encouraged customers to swap instead of refund, reducing refunds by over 60% while cutting return label costs in half. The result? A more profitable, customer-friendly returns process that drives revenue instead of draining it.
Table of Contents
About Canada Pooch
Canada Pooch, founded in 2011 in Toronto, specializes in stylish and functional apparel and accessories for dogs. With a presence in over 5,000 retail locations, Canada Pooch has built a loyal community of pet owners who value its quality and thoughtful designs. By combining practicality with fashion, the company has become a trusted name in pet apparel, delivering solutions that cater to both urban and outdoor lifestyles.
Challenges
"The biggest challenges prior to using Frate were getting returns in unsellable condition and not having the capacity to offer exchanges to customers, and offering products across our entire catalog."
Adrian Wilson, CX ManagerCanada Pooch was facing three key challenges:
- Returns coming back worn
- Exorbitant return label fees
- Only offering cash refunds
Solving these issues were extremely urgent for Canada Pooch. One way or another, each of these challenges have an impact on their bottom line and customer experience.
Receiving returns in poor condition, which is a very prevalent problem in the pet accessory space, means getting less out of inventory and increase warehousing costs.
Their former solution wouldn’t allow them to connect their strongly negotiated rates through their 3PL, meaning they were paying signficiantly more for return labels than their outbound labels.
Finally, the inability to offer customers an exchange means more refunds, and a higher probability that your customer will go spend their money elsewhere if you don’t make it easy to exchange for a different size, colour, or even completely different item.
Results
"We have seen a reduction in returns, which means we’re having to spend less time processing returns, and less time refurbishing returns, which has been great."
Jen Minchau, Director of Supply ChainOn day one, Canada Pooch implemented Frate’s AI image verification feature to automatically assess the condition of items while they’re still in their customer’s home. This allows them to do a an automated quality check of the item and flag potential fraudulent returns, before ever sending a return label.
Frate also integrated their 3PLs shipping account and reduced label costs by over 50%. Some return providers are adamant on using their own accounts (for unsaid reasons), yet we’re all about saving merchants money in all areas we can leverage.
Instead of solely offering refunds, Canada Pooch now allows customers to exchange for a different size or colour in one click - even if more expensive, as that payment can be captured directly within the Frate portal. They also allow customers to exchange for different items using Frate’s personalized exchanges and full-catalog exchanges. This has helped them reduce refunds by over 60%.
Intelligent returns starts here
