In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Brad Karney, Co-founder and CEO of Refundid. Brad describes himself as a retail enthusiast who combined this energy with his finance background to create a solution for a common pain point – refunds! Refundid provide instant refunds to customers on behalf of brands, when they want to make a return. Instead of customers having to wait until the item has made it’s often long journey back to the retailer, they get the cash in their pocket straight away. Refundid are backed by the venture arm of Afterpay and now have over 30 stores on board, including Culture Kings, Sass & Bide and General Pants. In this chat, Brad shares how Refundid take a load off customer service teams, what it felt like when he onboarded the brand that gave him the idea for the company and what he’s learned about cultivating powerful business connections.
“Oh wow, I can get my money back instantly, I’ve got confidence, I’ve got no reason not to buy.”
Brad Karney
Questions answered in this episode include…
- How did the idea for Refundid come about?
- What are the biggest pain points you’re solving for retailers?
- You’ve got retail-centric investors but you don’t have a retail background. How do you strike up those relationships?
Returns rage
“I think the problem is … I don’t like to throw Aus Post under the bus…but a lot of the anger towards retailers and the returns process is a lot to do with the retailer receiving the goods. And a lot of the fault is delayed logistics time. So customers are getting angry at retailers. And I don’t have the best answer for this, aside from get Refunded! But if retailers can share that they can’t do anything, which they can’t. And I feel really bad. This is what I’ve done to try to solve that.”
Value props
“When we partner with a retailer, we actually place ourselves on the PDP. It is optional. So we’ll place ourselves on the PDP, like Afterpay, Zip and the rest. But what we do is, it’s not on the payment side. You’re able to get your refund instantly through Refundid if you return. And what that does psychologically for the customer, it gives that sense of assurance.
If I do have to return this $500 item, I’m not going to be out of pocket $500 for weeks. And off the back of that single line on a PDP, we’ve seen huge conversion rate uplifts, average order value uplifts, because people are purchasing more and have more confidence. And total sales have increased. So the ROI from that alone, from the fees that are charged for Refundid, it’s incredible. So I get really excited about that, when my retail partners are succeeding.
But that’s one of the key value props that we’ve seen. The other one, especially for the enterprise and large retailers that are dealing with a huge amount of customers and big customer service teams, they’ll tell you that one of the biggest downfalls of customer service teams is dealing with this refund issue. Where not only does it take a crazy amount of time to process, but also you’ve got customers reaching out saying, where is my refund? I want my money back. And the rest. With us, that’s completely eliminated.”
So if you’ve got a customer service team of 10 or 15, let’s say 10 of them are spending time on the refunds, now only five need to be spending time on the refunds and the other five can actually be spending time on growing the company instead of dealing with these negative aspects of retail.”
Young demographic retailers
“Our CTO and also Co-founder, Ian Kessler, shares a story about his girlfriend, who was purchasing shoes. I hate to name-drop, but from Rebel. She was purchasing soccer boots and she wanted to return them and it took weeks to get the money back. And she didn’t want to spend the money to buy another pair, because then she would have been out of pocket another $200. But if she had got that money back quickly, she could have purchased and had those boots for her soccer game on the weekend. Right?
So I think talking about generations or talking about age or different demographics of retailers that we’re with, I think it becomes crucial when you’re at that university age where you don’t have endless amounts of money to spend.”
Links from the episode:
- NRF 2022
- Culture Kings
- Sonos
- Sass & Bide
- Tuchuzy
- Lioness
- Workwear Hub
- Princess Polly
- General Pants
- Universal Store
- Rebel Sport
- Shopify Plus and Tropeaka (sponsored)
- Signet and Ekoroo (sponsored)
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