Return Rate and RTO Impact Calculator

An RTO parcel never reaches the customer, so in most cases the product comes back sealed and resellable, and the cost is mostly one-way shipping. A post-delivery return has often been opened, sometimes used, and may need repackaging, quality checking, or can't be resold as new at all - so its true cost per unit is usually much higher. Blending both into a single "return rate %" hides which one is actually eating your margin.

Your marketplace settlement report shows the shipping fees charged for both forward and return legs, and your own records show how many returned units were resold at full price vs discounted vs written off. Average those over a few months for a realistic per-unit cost rather than guessing.

Category matters a lot - apparel and footwear naturally run higher return rates than, say, kitchenware, because of sizing and fit. Compare your rate against your own category's typical range rather than a single universal benchmark, and watch the trend over time more than any one month's number.

You enter that as part of the "RTO cost" and "post-delivery return cost" fields - include whatever the marketplace actually deducts for return logistics in those numbers so the output reflects your real net cost.

Yes - the math is marketplace-agnostic. Just use your own numbers for margin, return rate, and each cost per unit, since exact shipping and refund policies differ slightly between platforms.