So you got a lot of orders and you earned a nice amount, hold on to that money as there is a high chance you will refund a portion of that sum if you ordered from Aliexpress, Gearbest, China altogether.
Excuse the quality, this is a screenshot of my order spreadsheet, this is a total of 64 orders that have been refunded as of today (7 February), totaling a loss of £985
Why?
A few products that have been faulty and I simply refunded the customer to avoid the hassle of having to return the order however the larger portion of the refunds are because of unmet delivery times on Amazon (If you’re not using Amazon but something like Shopify, this still applies to you as you might have people performing chargebacks which is as relatively damaging because most payment processors will freeze your account if you have too many), I’ve even set up a 5 day delay on my dispatch time and it still doesn’t seem to be enough.
The Scenario
- An angry customer messages me because they haven’t received the order
- I check the order, it was supposed to arrive by January 27th.
- I check the tracking, the tracking is either limited ( doesn’t show anything after exiting China) or shows that it has arrived in the destination country on January 15th
Now I have literally no idea why those orders that arrived in the country have been sitting there for 15 days and still haven’t been delivered, of course this is not the customers fault and you mustn’t blame them however it can be quite annoying, even more when there is absolutely no tracking.
If you dropship expensive items they might be holding them and waiting for the customer to pay customs however all these refunded orders have been for products ranging from 15-30 euro and this wasn’t the case.
This has happened numerous times, surprisingly only for orders going to Spain/Italy and a few rare ones to France/Germany/UK
What can you and I do about this
Bite the bullet, if you run a business there will be losses, you can try to stall the customer as much as possible, ask them to confirm the address and if they reply on the same day wait another day to reply to them to buy as much time as possible as I’ve noticed by doing this some late orders have actually arrived, if I’m out of options I usually look at the calendar and tell the customer that if the order doesn’t arrive by the end of the week/next week, contact me and I usually have to refund them.
You can also set your production time on Amazon to be even longer than 7 days, sometimes those 2-3 days can mean the difference.
Dropshippers Blog 
Great guide keep it up!
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Great post, Tom. I have a question. How can you get money back to your card, the product back to supplier after you have to refund on Amazon?
Thanks.
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If the package never arrives you can ask for a refund on Aliexpress, if the package is delayed and you have to refund the customer as it’s past the expected delivery time then you can only try to stall the customer by asking hin to wait an extra week, otherwise if you have to refund your customer you can’t get a refund on Aliexpress if the package does arrive eventually.
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Hi, If the customer wants to return the product and get refund, then what return address will you give to the customer. Thanks for a lot of great info
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It would probably be cheaper to have the customer return the product to you and you can re-sell it later, otherwise if you want to return it directly to the store then shipping to China might be a little expensive.
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