Getting a lot of Returns – Advice

Hello all!

I have recently started on Amazon/Ecom and encountered a lot of problems.

– I sell products which requires the person to measure themselve and most of the times the person measures himself wrong and orders the wrong size.

– About 30% of the products I sell get returned and on my online store most of these returns are exchanges for a differenz size. On Amazon there are no exchanges, all of them are refunds.

– It is near to impossible to delete that problem of people measuring not correctly since they have to be precise and most of the people simply are not.

Me as a beginner to Amazon I offered all of the people who wanted a refund a free refund without having to send the product back and if they wanted an exchange they got one for Free – so that i receive good customer feedback. Oh and btw i produce in europe and my main market is america – so if they return an item its costly for them which i do not want. (do not know how to solve that problem yet)

(I sell about 80% standard sized items and 20% custom sized. Custom sized usually always fit because people need to take more measurements rather than standard sized they only need 1. People love the standard items tho and me too because i can produce them faster) I sent straight from my production 48 hours to everywhere in the USA and pay 18 USD currently. (Product costs around 130USD)

So my first big mistake that I did is not respond to the returns box in the first month of selling on Amazon since I thought Amazon refunds them anyways after 3 days. But what i did not know is ….

You need to respond to the claims everyday within 48 hours. I messed up and now have a order defect rate of over 3% and cannot run ads for another 60 days. Oh well.. learned the hard way. Lost all my buy boxes and instead of 30 sales I get like 3 sales.

When calculating that month of Amazon I only break even because of that return issue. Furthermore i have gotten 1 bad review about a customer who tried to return to the europe address and saying bla bla they were charged 40 USD. Even though the customers do not need to return, we automatically refund them if they have a complaint.

MY QUESTION NOW IS:

What would you recommend me to do to succeed on Amazon.

I got to wait another 60 days for my order defect rate to go down. In that time I want to perfect a plan to conquer Amazon.

Is there any trick to go with the returns. Would you recommend me to find a warehouse in the US which sends orders and takes returns? So its cheap for customers to send it back? Do you happen to know a good one?

Or do i go full into FBA? Is it worth?

In the future there will be more bad reviews since those 30% who did not measure properly complain and then give bad feedback even though we would offer them everything they want. So we really got to get the satisfied customers to make a positive feedback.

All my competitors on Amazon have the same return problem and are around a 3 to 4 star max rating. The biggest one is active on FBA.

Would appreciate any help! Thank you