Presenting Your Best Self – 3: Reversals

Welcome to the third installment of the “Presenting Your Best Self” series which focuses on topics related to making a great first impression with Affiliate prospects. Today, we’re going to talk about how to best manage transaction reversals.

Affiliates expect and understand that voided sales are a part of normal business activity. Items are returned, credit cards fail, parts of orders are cancelled, etc. As such, Affiliates will anticipate seeing a reasonable percentage of sales returns in a given month. With that in mind, they will take a look at a Merchant’s reversal rate trend from the past 45 days when considering a new program to join. If a reversal rate is unusually high, it will throw up a red flag to the Affiliate that the Merchant may not be playing fair with crediting Affiliate sales.

Tips:

1. Reversals are representative of the day the transaction was voided in the ShareASale interface. Therefore, if all voids are processed on one day, the reversal trend report will reflect a spike in voids on that day which could reflect an extremely high percentage of reversals for your program.
2. If your website receives a high volume of voids or returns throughout the month, it would be best to reconcile these transactions as they come in or set time aside several times in the month to manage these rather than processing in a large batch on one day of the month.
3. Consider setting up an API report to handle transaction edits. With the API report, your ShareASale account will update automatically when you make a change to the transaction in your own retail database. This would allow you to manage your returns/voids all from one place.

In the screenshot below for example, you can see the Merchant ran the majority of their reversals over a short 6 day period. As a result they had a reversal rate above 100% for one day and it was above 75% on 5 other days. The Merchant in this case, would be better off spreading out the reversals throughout the month rather than posting all the voids just before the transaction lock date. If an Affiliate happened to view only the reversal percentage during that week, they may not realize that it’s a temporary spike and not a general practice for the Merchant to reverse over 75% of sales.