Returns
How to reduce returns
on lighting.
Why lamps come back, and which of those reasons a product page can fix.
A return costs you the outbound shipping, the inbound shipping, the handling, and usually the product itself — a lamp that has been unpacked once rarely goes back on the shelf at full price. In lighting the rate runs high, and the reason is structural: the customer is buying something they cannot see. Not the object. The light.
Returns split into two piles, and only one of them is yours to fix on the product page. Knowing which is which saves you from writing copy at a problem that lives in the warehouse.
The pile you can fix
These are all versions of the same sentence: it looked different.
It looked different lit
The big one, and almost entirely a photography problem. Your catalogue photo was taken under even studio light. That shows the shape, the finish and the texture, and says nothing about the thing being bought. A linen shade goes warm and grainy when it is lit from inside. An opal globe goes from grey to milk. A perforated shade throws a pattern on the wall that is either the reason somebody buys it or the reason they send it back.
None of that is in a daylight photo, so the customer fills the gap with a guess — and a guess is wrong about half the time.
It was bigger than I thought
Second biggest, and the fix is boring and works. Dimensions in a table are not scale: a number is not a size. What reads as scale is something ordinary in the frame — a chair, a door, a hand on the switch — or a line drawing with the measurements on it. And if you sell more than one size, put the height in the variant name. Faro Arched Floor Lamp · 180 cm beats Faro Arched Floor Lamp · Large every single time.
The colour was off
Brass that photographs yellow and arrives pink. Black that turns out to be charcoal. You cannot fix the customer's monitor, but you can stop making it worse: shoot on a neutral backdrop, do not grade lamp photos towards a look, and say the finish in words as well as pixels. Unlacquered brass — it will darken where you touch it prevents more returns than any photograph.
The light was the wrong colour
The same lamp at 2700 K and at 4000 K are two different products in somebody's living room. If yours ships with a bulb, put the temperature on the page and show it. If it does not, say that clearly and recommend one — a customer who guesses and guesses wrong does not blame the bulb.
The pile you cannot fix from the product page
Worth naming, so you stop trying to solve it with copy:
- Broken in transit. Glass and ceramic. This is a box problem. No photograph has ever survived a courier.
- Wrong fitting or voltage. A hardware problem. Put E27 / E14 / GU10 and the voltage where they cannot be missed and it stops being a return and becomes a question before the sale.
- Changed my mind. Some fraction is irreducible. Chasing it costs more than it saves.
What to measure
Do not track the overall return rate — it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Track reason codes per product. If one lamp comes back at three times the rate of its neighbours, the problem is that page, and it is almost always one of the four above. Fix the page and watch that code disappear before you touch anything else.
The honest limit: showing a lamp lit removes the guess about the light. It does nothing for a shade that arrives cracked and nothing for someone who ordered the wrong fitting. Fix the box and the spec table first — they are cheaper than everything else on this page.
Every lamp in your shop, lit
LightsOff puts a switch on your storefront. The shopper flips it, your shop dims, and every lamp comes on in its own night photograph — generated from the daytime photo you already have, without touching your theme.
See how it works