A customer initiates a sales return by filling in a return slip. The returned items are received in the merchant’s warehouse, where the return is approved or denied. When approved, the customer will get a refund.
Creation of a new SO for exchange or replace items is not supported.
A process flow diagram would look like this:
Process initiation
A sales return process can be initiated in several ways.
- Customer support initiates an RMA and sends a return slip.
- An RMA is initiated through a dedicated web page where a return slip is generated. This can be done in cooperation with TA delivery checkouts
- A return slip is included with the original package.
- A customer does not collect the items from the TA, which results in an automatic return.
Process initiation is not included in this Litium implementation of sales return management.
Receipt of package at warehouse
When a return package is accepted at the receiving warehouse, an RMA will be initiated. This can be done automatically in the following ways:
- The return package includes a return slip that was system generated with a scan code linked to a system-created RMA.
- Integration with TAs, using TA-supplied return slips.
- Scan of original order id, which initiates an RMA with possible return quantities.
RMA approval
As an integrated step in the business process, an RMA must be approved before any of the following actions can take place.
- Create an SRO to refund money.
- Create a new SO to exchange or replace items.
An SRO uses the existing order object in the Litium API, but it is marked Sales Return Order. Additional order discounts and fees can be applied to an SRO. Since the order rows of an SRO correspond to those of the SO, other fields, such as order rows, should not be modified. The cross referencing is kept in a separate table.
Financial management
The accounting system of the merchant must be updated with the financial information related to returned items. This information should reflect the actual amounts refunded to the customer. For this reason, an SRO is created when the corresponding RMA has been approved and completed, with links from SRO to the RMA and original SO.
RMA approval flag
The RME approval flag can be set when specific states are reached. Please refer to the Recommendations section, later on in this text.
For automatic setting of this flag, based on the merchant’s business logic, projects may also build a periodic scheduled task that will scan the RMAs by their state and approval status, then check the necessary conditions.
For merchants that don’t use this field, the flag can be made redundant by setting it to true by default when the RMA is created.