Automating returns and complaints handling
A return request arrives by email, through a form or in an Allegro message. Before anyone can start handling it, someone has to find the order, check the deadline and copy the case into the spreadsheet or system the team uses to track it.
How much this process costs you a year
The sliders start from values typical for this process. Swap them for your own — the result recalculates instantly, no account and no email required.
This process costs you
Realistically you will recover from PLN 0 to PLN 0 a year
Here is the math: salary times the employer cost multiplier 1.2 divided by 173 hours a month gives the hourly rate. That rate times the hours in a year gives the cost of the process. From the recovery we take a band of 40% to 70%, because part of the time recovered on paper comes back as supervising the automation and handling exceptions. This is a deliberately conservative range, not a promise.
Where the hours go
Handling a single request means finding the order, checking the statutory deadline, assessing whether the claim is justified and making a decision, and finally issuing a refund or exchanging the item. At a few dozen requests a month, simply matching each case to the right order takes longer than the decision itself.
The cost that is hard to spot in a schedule is a missed statutory response deadline. A complaint without a deadline in plain sight waits on someone's memory, and a customer who does not get an answer in time is entitled to treat the complaint as accepted in their favour.
What automation does
A request from any channel lands in one place, immediately linked to the order by order number or the customer's email address. The response deadline is visible and sends a reminder before it passes, not after the fact.
Once a decision is made, the refund or the exchange label is generated automatically, and the customer gets the status without asking. People stay on assessing whether the claim is justified, the one part that cannot and should not be automated.
What it costs and when it pays back
Implementation usually falls between 3,000 and 9,000 PLN. The price rises with the number of channels requests come through and with whether refunds should be started automatically or just flagged to a person as a reminder.
Payback comes in the third to sixth month. Enter in the calculator how many people handle returns today and how many hours a week it takes them to see the annual cost of that work.
Contractors working with these tools
This process is most often built on the tools below. Each link opens a catalog narrowed to contractors who've declared it — rates, availability, and ratings from settled contracts.
Frequently asked questions
Usually 3,000 to 9,000 PLN as a one-off, within the platform's automation range of 2,000 to 20,000 PLN. More request channels and automatically triggered refunds push the quote upwards.
No, the decision stays with a person. The automation gathers the data, keeps track of the deadline and carries out the technical steps after the decision, but assessing whether a claim is justified is always done by someone on the team.
Yes, that is one of the reasons most often given for this implementation. The deadline is counted from the moment the request is made and sends a reminder in advance, instead of only becoming visible once it has passed.
If the marketplace offers an API for messages and returns, they go into the same workflow as complaints from your own online shop. Without an API the request still has to be moved across by hand, but the rest of the handling no longer requires manual work.