"Free returns" is on almost every product page now, which means it's stopped doing much. People r..."Free returns" is on almost every product page now, which means it's stopped doing much. People r...
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"Free returns" is on almost every product page now, which means it's stopped doing much.
People read it the way they read a cookie banner at this point tbh.
It's just there, it's what stores say, and it doesn't really answer the thing they're actually worried about.
Because the worry usually isn't whether returns cost money.
It's whether returning something is going to be a hassle.
Printing a label, finding a box, queuing at a post office, chasing a refund that takes three weeks to show up.
So we've started testing swapping it for something that answers that instead.
"Free returns" → "Free returns, no printer needed"
Or "Free returns, refunded within 48 hours of it arriving back."
The first one tells you what it costs.
The second tells you what it's actually like, which is the bit people are quietly weighing up.
And that's the pattern with a lot of these standard trust lines.
They've been repeated so much they've turned into decoration.
The version that still works is the one that names the specific friction the customer is imagining, instead of the category the friction belongs to.
Same promise. Just answering the question they're actually asking.
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