Brad Carney: In those first few months it gave us that reputation and said, oh, these guys aren't messing around, this is real, we can trust them. For anyone trying to make those connections warmly, it's always better than cold. So now when a customer is shopping, they can see, oh wow, I can get my money back instantly. I've got confidence. I've got no reason not to buy.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at e commerce talent agency E Suite. Now I may be hitting you but with a very sensitive topic for this time of year.
Nathan Bush: But here goes.
Nathan Bush: Today's guest describes himself as a retail enthusiast who has combined this energy with his finance background to create a solution for a very common pain point. Refunds. Yes, refunds.
Brad Carney: Stay with me.
Nathan Bush: Brad Carney is the co founder of Refunded. They provide instant refunds to customers on behalf of brands when customers want to make a return. Instead of customers having to wait until the item has made its often long journey back to a retailer, customers get the cash in their pocket straight away. Refunded are backed by the venture arm of Afterpay and Now have over 30 stores on board including Culture Kings, Sassonbide and General Pants. In this chat, Brad shares how Refunded took a load off customer service teams, what it felt like when he onboarded the very reputable brand that gave him the idea for the company in the first place and what he's learned about cultivating powerful business connections.
Nathan Bush: I hope I haven't triggered you so far.
Nathan Bush: Now, thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Brad Carney, CEO and co founder of Refunded.
Nathan Bush: Brad, welcome to ADD to Cart.
Brad Carney: Thanks Nathan. Great to be here mate.
Nathan Bush: We've had to move this. I'm currently filming this for anyone who's watching it. I'm currently filming it in my parents in law's house in Bundaberg and sweating my butt off. We moved it because you had a Covid scare pre Christmas. Everything okay now?
Brad Carney: Yeah, everything's good. I mean I think everyone did pre Christmas period. Everyone's a bit nervy going out. You get a bit of a sniff Or a sore throat, kind of go into Code Red, I think, you know, now we're kind of shifting through that period as well. But I was all good. I'm still in Sydney at the moment. A bit humid, a bit mucky weather. But back in the office, which is really good.
Nathan Bush: Nice. And I hear that it's upset some plans for you in terms of traveling early next year?
Brad Carney: Yeah, I was supposed to head off to New York next week for the big retail show. They've got a NRF retail conference where it's like one of the biggest conferences in the us, let alone the world. Similar to kind of what, online retail or retail fest over here. But just due to the significant cases there, I heard I was speaking to a friend over in the US and they were like, if you go outside, you get Coke and you walk outside, you immediately get it. So I thought it was better to delay that in terms of a trip and stay in Australia for a bit longer.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's been really funny seeing some of the big conferences kick off, even ces. I've seen some photos on Twitter recently and it is normally pumping with all sorts of robots and crazy TVs and all sorts of stuff. It just looks empty. So it's going to be interesting to see what events look like in 2022. Hopefully they're all back because I know people in E commerce are just frothing to catch up again. It just feels like it's been so long.
Brad Carney: Definitely. I think it's exciting this year. You know, even talking about, you know, there is a bit of COVID uncertainty, but I think the events will be better than ever because everyone is so excited that the E commerce managers and, you know, across all retailers I speak to are just so excited to get going across all of them. You know, see all these new solutions. Because what's happened is over the COVID period of 2020 and 2021, there's been all this new innovation in retail that hasn't had the opportunity to shed its slide. And I'm excited to see it myself, you know, learn a bit more.
Nathan Bush: And you've given me such a great lead in there for a question. So we've obviously, in terms of innovation over this period, refunded has come up. And you're the founder. Co founder, yeah.
Brad Carney: Co founder. Co founder and CEO. That is my title. Glorified title. I like to call it Retail enthusiast. Used to be a finance enthusiast. You put those two together and you get refunded.
Nathan Bush: Nice.
Nathan Bush: So tell us about refunded. What is it?
Brad Carney: Yeah. So refunded started June 2020 to solve a massive pain point in retail, which is refunds. My partner, Joe Aaron was returning something to Culture Kings and it took six weeks for him to get his refund back during an extremely busy period for Culture Kings. And it was a situation that is completely out of Culture's control. So for a customer to get their refund back, if you look at that six week period, what happened was Joel decided that he wanted to make a return. You have to take it to the post office or wherever. However, to get it back, Colchians then needed to wait to receive it. And you know, during busy times it can take, you know, one week, two weeks, even three weeks. And that's out of the retailer's control. So customers get frustrated. The retailer where it should be directed at the logistics players, right? And then once it's received by colch Kings, they need to process it. And during those times it can even be longer. It can take, you know, a few days to even get to the return. And I'm sure as a customer you've seen even once it's processed, you'll get an email saying, oh, please wait five to seven days for it to reach your account. So if you're out of those stages, you get to three, four, five weeks pretty quickly. I think a lot of customers that are in retail experience that quite a lot. So off the back of that, we decide to solve that problem. And that's what refunded is today, a solution that eliminates that friction point where customers are unsurd and shopping online because if they do return something, they'll be out of pocket 1, 2, 3, $400 per week with no. So that's what we've done. And how the solution works is we completely eliminate those stages that I recently spoke about. You know, the sending it back, the waiting for, the processing, the bank processing times. Instead, when we partner with the retailer, we give the customer the ability to get their refund instantly, even before they've sent it back. Okay, so there's no uncertainty for the customer. There's no customers complaining to the reader say, it's the retailer saying, where's my money? I want my money back now. I'm never shopping here again. What we've done is we've put confidence in the customer to shop at a retailer. So now when a customer is shopping, they can see, oh wow, I can get my money back instantly. I've got confidence, I've got no reason not to buy.
Nathan Bush: So from your side, how do you know that the customer has returned the item.
Brad Carney: Yeah. So what we do, we put a lot of trust in the customer. So when the customer wants to use refunded, how we kind of position ourselves is we're a global first refund option. So if you look back five, six years, the way you could purchase was like Amex, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal. Now Afterpay was that real first option of another way to pay. This is what we are. We're a new option for a customer to get their refund back. So how that works is how we know the customer sent it back when they choose refunded, and we give them that refund. We give the customer three business days to provide a tracking number. Right. And the reason we give them time and don't require it straight away because on a Sunday, you know, the post office is closed. Let's say the customer wants to get their refund back straight away. Right. We give them those three business days, they then provide the tracking number and we've got that ability to see, oh, it's in transit. It's in transit. The retailers received it. And then when the retailer does receive it, they just let us know.
Nathan Bush: Gotcha. And then the retailer transfers to you.
Brad Carney: Correct. Well, we do a direct debit of sorts. Direct debit. We've got that agreement.
Nathan Bush: Got you. And obviously I can see the benefit here. From a customer's perspective and from customer's experience, are they going to the refunded source site to process that or is it in the retailer site that they process this?
Brad Carney: Yes, it's kind of two options. If the customer knows, you know, refunded's partnered with them. So for example, Culture Kings, we've partnered with them now it's kind of a sentimental partnership after, you know, it originally started with Culture Kings. You know, let's say customers know Culture Kings have refunded, they can just go directly to the refunded website.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brad Carney: Right. For customers that might not, they'll go to the return policy like usual. You know, a customer, if they want to return something to go to the return policy and they'll see refunded as an option. Yeah. They'll then select that and it goes to a pop up page where they're taken through that quick process to get their money back. It's the equivalent of, you know, on the payment side if they're paying with PayPal after pay. Yeah. Just on the refund side.
Nathan Bush: Oh, I love it. I love it. I've recently had this experience and I wasn't going to call it out but it was so bad that it was Sonos. And so I thought I'd do the right thing, buy direct from Sonos and obviously big global country and they've got territories everywhere. I thought I'd do go direct rather than buying through a retailer. But it was a faulty product. And the returns process has been exactly what you said. It's been three hours of live chat to diagnose that, yes, it was faulty. Then you had to email because there was no live chat. Emails back and forth, two days delay. So it's going to be, God, 10 weeks, 12 weeks until I get a refund back for something that's out of my control.
Brad Carney: It's crazy. And the confidence kind of shifts now for you in Sonos, right, To kind of purchase from them again, compared to, let's say they would have refunded, you would have just gone through, funded, got your money back and forget about it. That's it. And then you'll know, oh, I can just always purchase from Sonos, right? Because I've got that confidence. That's really what we're doing. So thanks for bringing that up.
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Nathan Bush: I can see it from a customer's perspective in terms of the customer experience, which is always a great place to start. How are you selling this into retailers? Because I'm assuming that there's a fee for them to have the refunded service.
Brad Carney: Yeah, of course, there's a few main value props for why, you know, a lot of Australian retailers currently are taking us on and partnering us with us in this early stage. I think the big one is confidence. Right? So there's some really interesting stats of uncertainty for customers shopping online. So around 60, it's over. Actually, I'll call it around around 60% of customers, when they're about to purchase something online, they'll go check the return policy before they purchase. And if they're not certain. And they don't have confidence they won't purchase the item. You can imagine, you know, if you're purchasing something for $500, you're like, oh, if I have to return this, am I going to be able to be out of pocket $500 for, as you said, 10 to 12 weeks or something? I assume the Sonos was a pretty.
Nathan Bush: And for me, it wasn't even the price, it was just the process. And it seems to me you're solving both.
Brad Carney: It's arduous. It's an arduous process for a customer. That confidence is completely given by refunded. What we do is when we partner with the retailer, we actually place ourselves on the pdp. It is optional, so we'll place up on the PDP like afterpay, zip and the rest. But what we do is it's not a payment side, it's you're able to get your refund instantly through refunded if you return. And what that does psychologically for the customer, it gives that sense of, you know, assurance. Yeah. You know, that if I do have to return this $500 item, I'm not going to be out of pocket $500 for weeks. And if 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 in that, total sales have increased. So the ROI from that alone, from the fees that are charged for a funded, it's incredible. So I get really excited about that when my retail partners are succeeding. But that's. That's a one of the key value props that we've seen.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brad Carney: The other one, that that's especially for the enterprise and large retailers that, you know, are dealing with a huge amount of customers and big customer service teams, they'll tell you that one of the biggest downfalls is cost 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's my refund? I want my money back. And the rest of the with us, that's completely eliminated. Right. So if you've got a customer service team of 10 or 15 that are, you know, 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.
Nathan Bush: That's A big pain point because a lot of the times refunds is treated as a side or a back end process to the supply chain and it's kind of tacked on to the end rather than its own process.
Brad Carney: Exactly, exactly. So those are some two key ones and I think the one that leeches off that customer service one is retention. Right. So bringing back the Sonos example, you probably, it would be really hard for you to purchase from Sonos directly again now because of that experience. You don't want to go through that. What we've done is let's say a lot of other Sonos experience that a lot of other customers have. When a retailer's got refunded, that won't happen. Right. But instead, instead of a bad experience, you've turned that bad experience where the customer will never shop into an incredible special experience. We've actually heard special quite a bit where the customer gets their money instantly into their bank account instantly. It's quite a special. Like, wow, that instant gratification instead of that negative, you've turned it into a customer getting their money back straight away. Wow, this was an incredible experience. I love this store because they offer this. I'm going to keep shopping at the store more and more and more.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, right.
Brad Carney: Because if you've got two, two retailers that are quite similar and you know that retailer, let's say X and Y, retailer X has refunded and you can have that confidence, you're going to keep purchasing at that retailer X and X and not Y. Right. So it's a pretty, pretty powerful tool.
Nathan Bush: And I think as retailers we can always justify why, why refunds take so long.
Brad Carney: Right.
Nathan Bush: We can always say, well, look, we've got to reconcile, we've got to find the order, we've got to wait for shipping, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. From a customer's perspective, it should be simple, you know what I mean? They can't see all the intricacies that go into that refund process in the back end, waiting on banks, all that sort of stuff. So you're meeting a customer's expectation rather than what we've come to know as normal in retail.
Brad Carney: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think the big thing for us as well is that, you know, for the retailer talking about, you know, they've always got an excuse when using refunded, there's no risk for them anymore. Our big thing is no risk. So it's a bit of a no brainer for retailers to do that.
Nathan Bush: Are you able to give us an
Nathan Bush: indication on costs for retailers to Implement refunded.
Brad Carney: Yeah, sure. So there's no setup costs at all. It's a month to month contract. So there's no, you know, 12 month lock in where a lot of, you know, tech plays do have. We are month to month and the reason we do that is because we've got a lot of confidence in our product. And you know, for context, we've had no retailer that's joined that's left us. So we've had no churn rate. The reason we do month to month is to show them, guys, this is really incredible. Try it, just try it and have a go and see how your customers like it. See what the metrics look like, see if there's actually an increase in conversion. But if you don't want it, you can take it off. That's why we do the month to month and no setup costs. The only cost they have is as we're a refund option of refunds. We don't take all refunds. So if customers want to choose us as a refund option like they choose after as a payment option.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Brad Carney: Usually when we go into a site, 30 to 40, even 50% of customers will choose us. Of the refunds that go through us and are accepted, they pay us 3 to 5%. That's the kind of fee and that's just depending on volume. Similar to kind of how after back when it was like four to six or something, we're three to five. But it's a bit different to the buy now, pay later. Some people get a bit scared of that. But what we really are is a tiny, tiny segment of refunds compared to kind of payments where you are charged that fee. And I think it's like 99%, I'll say it, 99% of retailers we put forward that case study or ROI and spend forecast, like wow, we thought it'd be so much more. So it's actually not too much. And especially when you look at the returns that we're getting in terms of kind of conversion rates and average order value, all our retailers are in the
Nathan Bush: money and in terms of integration, the technical capabilities needed. How are you going about that?
Brad Carney: Yeah, so for kind of the main e commerce platforms, we've got, you know, applications or plugins where the integration is, you know, can be done in 15 minutes. Right. Given that, you know, their backend is quite simple with the bigger guys, there are kind of some, you know, integrations to connect with other third parties which we take care of in most cases, you know, Shopify BigCommerce Magento. We're about to have commerce tools as well. Salesforce could be. Forget WooCommerce, could be for getting a couple other guys.
Nathan Bush: So you've got most of them covered.
Brad Carney: Yeah, we got, we've got an incredible engineering team aerofunded that do that. And I think the better part is for those custom built platforms as well that don't usually have the opportunities to take advantage of these tech. We actually build custom platforms. So if there's like a retailer that has their own custom website, we work with them, we do all the tech build and we're able to offer it to them, which they get really excited about.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. So is the typical integration straight into the platform? There's no need to do a separate integration into finance or shipping systems?
Brad Carney: No, no. So we cover that all through our system. Yeah, it's simply like, let's say It's Shopify or BigCommerce. They simply download an application that connects to us. We put a bit of, let's say HTML on the PDP or something on the return policy to let customers know that they've got refunded and that's it. Right. You just reap the benefits. We've done it. It's actually quite funny. We've done a. We're speaking to a retailer a few months ago, a 30 minute call. We ended up integrating with them within the 30 minutes. So we told them about the product, they were like, oh, we need this now. And we did it in the same call and have them up within that an hour.
Nathan Bush: Hope you did some user testing in that time as well.
Brad Carney: Yeah, we did. You just need to do a test or two.
Nathan Bush: Good stuff.
Nathan Bush: Now I think we've got a really
Nathan Bush: great idea around how refunded works and the problem you're solving. I'm really keen to hear your story because you mentioned that came from a finance background. The idea came about when your co founder had a really bad experience with Culture Kings. But fast forward and now Culture Kings are actually using the solution from that experience. Tell us about the growth that you've experienced over the last two years and how you've built refunded into what it is today.
Brad Carney: Yeah, well, looking at a bit of a timeline, as mentioned, we really kicked off in June 2020. Understood this is a real problem. So we found the problem with Culture Kings. We started doing some market research, understanding is this a problem universally. Just for a bit of context. I was from a finance background in investment banking, so when this problem came to mind, I was initially thinking some sort of Fintech Angle. Joel Aaron, my other co founder, he was a massive e commerce guru during university or even at any time. He was running 1, 2, 3 e commerce stores at once. So he had that background which was really useful. So we started looking at market research, understanding is this a problem? How do we solve this? What are the real pain points? How can we improve this so retailers benefit significantly. We landed to a point in probably around October, developed a product, launched in February with a few stores to do kind of the soft testing and then it really kicked off in probably May, June this year. So now we're in 2022 for like six to seven months ago. And since then we're now over 30 stores live. We'll probably be 50 stores live in the next month or two with some of the biggest names shouting out. Culture King is one of them. Sassonbai, Tuchuzi, Lioness Workwear Hub, soon to be Princess Polly, General Pants, Universal Store. Some really exciting names and I think what I love is the customer centric brands and retailers that at the click of a button, or not even click of a button, after a minute of me talking and explaining what we're doing, you can see the excitement. So that's where we're at now. I think this year is really exciting because it's our first full year, as mentioned, we really only kicked off though launched in February of 2021. We really only kicked off May, June 2021. So it's an exciting period for us definitely.
Nathan Bush: And it's funny with the brands that you mentioned, obviously a lot of youth centric brands there and I don't think you'll mind me saying is that you're young yourself as a founder. Do you feel like refunds and it's a leading question, but do you think refunds play more important part for younger shoppers coming through than they may have in the past for older shoppers?
Brad Carney: I think definitely, I think definitely a nice story or segue to go into that. Our CTO and also co founder Ilan Keslov, she shares a story about his, his partner girlfriend that was purchasing shoes. I hate to name drop but from Rebel, she was purchasing soccer boots and she wanted to return them and she, she, it took, I don't want to. It could have been like weeks to get it back. Right. And she didn't want to spend the money to buy another pair because then she would have been out of pocket, you know, another $200. But if she got that money back quickly, she could have purchased and have those boots for a Soccer game on the weekend, right?
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brad Carney: So I think like talking about generations or talking about age or different, you know, demographics of retailers that we're with. I think it becomes crucial when you're at that, you know, university age where you don't have endless amounts of money to spend, where let's say you buy a jumper for $300, if you don't get that money back, you can't buy
Nathan Bush: another jumper and you might not have lines of credit available to you either.
Brad Carney: Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. So that's where it becomes really important. And that's the other value prop, where it's like, this is real, this can really help people. Aside from the fact of conversion and where, let's say later stage like Sasson buys a bit of an older demographic, still, those customers absolutely love us because they've got a high tide ticket items 5, $600. And still, even if you've got all the money or you can afford it, you still want that back, right?
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Brad Carney: But I think it is a nice touching point to think that, you know, you are actually helping people there.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Now, do you come across this from retailers at all? Because retailers generally don't want to encourage returns. You're making returns very easy. Is that a concern for some that you speak to?
Brad Carney: This was when we were creating this product. This was our biggest concern because we did not want to do that. We didn't want to increase returns at all. I can happily say that across, you know, all our retailers after, you know, since we've launched, not one has recorded an increase in return rate. The reason being, you know, maybe there is a slight increase in, you know, marginal returns, but the increase in total sales and orders from the conversion and confidence of customers have, has far offset that, if that makes sense. How do you measure that in terms of measure? You look at, you know, the return rate when we start before refunded and the return rate, let's say six months later or a year later, and that's what we'll look at. And then you'll dive a bit deeper and you say, oh, wow, the return. This has actually happened. The return rate dropped 2% after launching, refunded. And we all looked around, we were like, wow, this is interesting. So we dive deeper and total returns actually grew kind of, as I mentioned, the same kind of metric, total returns grew a bit, but total orders grew by so much more that the return rate actually decreased. Yeah, right. And now that got me excited. I was like, wow, this is, this is great. Now you can't attribute all the orders to the refunded, but you can definitely. We were able to strip out and understand, you know, what conversion rate uplift, what total order order uplift was attributed to refunded. And we were super happy about that.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Now, when you went into Culture Kings, and I don't expect you to tell us all the inside and out stories, but did you actually use them? Did you share the story of using them as your inspiration for starting 100%?
Brad Carney: 100%.
Nathan Bush: How was that received?
Brad Carney: Yeah, it. It was very. It was very. I think we got the meeting, you know, quite a while after we launched and we were all very, very excited for it. We'd had bigger stores, you know, but they're huge. But it was more just the sentimental, you know, not saying it was emotional, but maybe it was a bit like, wow, you know, this is something that's changing.
Nathan Bush: What's the vision come to life, right?
Brad Carney: Yeah, it's the vision come to life. And it's like they know they've got the problem. They knew it straight away and they were like, wow, this, this is something that can solve that.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant.
Brad Carney: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Now, two years, two and a half years in, really taken off in the last year. You've got investors on board like Paul Greenberg, who is behind a lot of ventures in E Commerce in Australia and AP Ventures, obviously the Afterpay venture arm. How have you formed those relationships? I'm sure we've got plenty of people who have got, who are developing solutions and looking for investment. What advice would you have for them to develop those types of relationships?
Brad Carney: Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. I think prior to refunded, I was going down the investment banking pathway and finance pathway, where you do intersect with a lot of those venture capital funds like AP Ventures or even Afterpay itself, where you get kind of intertwined with them for some reason or another. I think with Afterpay and how that was led, I mean, I kind of in the same circle as Nick Mo and I went to the same high school as Nick. So I was able to kind of wiggle my way through to someone to speak to there that kind of first get advice in the early days and that kind of led to a discussion and a more conversation and then eventually an investment out of AP Ventures, which was super exciting. I think with. With Paul. I was. I had a mutual friend of Paul and I asked for an intro because I knew what Paul could do. I knew, you know, he had the ability to take us from here to there, to actually give US retail advice kind of I like to say, you know, walk our hands through the retail sector and he's been brilliant in that. So I think like in terms of, to answer your question, for anyone trying to like make those connections warmly, it's always better than cold. If you can go through three mutual friends that one person knows another person knows another person that may know that person, that's kind of the best way.
Nathan Bush: We had Matt from Tractor Ventures on and he was always talking about the lead time around. Investment isn't so much around how long it takes to get through the pitch and the prospectus and all that sort of stuff. It's those months and years before about having a bit of back and forth conversation and getting to know each other before it even comes to here's what I've got, here's what's on the table. Those kind of conversations for sure.
Brad Carney: I think especially in my time during finance, investment banking, it is a big networking game. So you build those networks and it just day after day of, you know, trying to build connections that someday will reap dividends.
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Nathan Bush: And in terms of using that investment, you mentioned that you've got a great technical team behind you. Is the investment more from the technical side or is it getting the brand name out through marketing? Where do you really see that? You've got to put most of the effort in at the moment to grow this even further.
Brad Carney: It's definitely people so hiring we haven't done too much marketing. The marketing that we will do is to boost our partner brands. So you know, if we have a store that launches, we'll boost them significantly, invest some money to grow them and bring brand awareness that all refunded partner with them. We'll shoot stuff to our customers as well. But the key, the key thing for us raising that money was growing our team so we can develop more products. Have those E Comm integrations make it so the integrations are so simple so it's easy for us to grow.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, great stuff. And are you keeping it all Locally based here in Australia or are you looking to expand the team throughout the world?
Brad Carney: Currently we're local. Everyone's here actually in Australia. We are exploring other regions which we're super excited about. But in terms of a team, you know, we're Australian born. We will continue to kind of be that and we're really proud of that as well. I think, you know, what Afterpay did is kind of put Australian tech as well as Canberra and Atlassian on the map. We'd like to kind of continue that path.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Great. And have you seen other people with a similar solution to yours outside of Australia or are you unique in the marketplace?
Brad Carney: Definitely unique. So we're a first to market in terms of a refund option. We are that kind of global first refund option. So it's kind of after paying all those payment options, we're like making that option industry for the refunds. There are companies around the world that target the return space, which are really successful big companies that we respect and we actually partner with them. But we are quite a unique product that no other company can offer.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, great. So speaking to so many retailers around the refunds and the refund process, even if we've got listeners who own retail stores who can't actually onboard refunded right now, if you had one piece of advice around what pisses off customers the most around refund process that retailers could easily change, what would it be?
Brad Carney: I think it's just straight up transparency. If you can't offer refunded and instant refund, it's a lot of transparency. And I think the problem is I don't like to throw Auspost under the bus, but a lot of the anger towards retailers and the returns is a lot to do with the retailer receiving the goods and a lot of the fault is, is delayed logistics time. So customers are getting angry at retailers. I don't have the best answer for this aside from get refunded, but it's, it's. If retailers can share that, you know, they can't do anything, which they can't and I feel really bad. Oh, this is what I've done to try kind of solve that. But if retailers can share, like look, it's out of our control and it
Nathan Bush: purely is that's close and close that window between themselves and. And the Australia Post so that they're doing the most that they can do to close that window.
Brad Carney: So as soon get the goods back, you process it straight away. Because you've also got bank processing times following that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, right.
Brad Carney: So like you need to close out those times, but sometimes it's not possible. Like we were speaking to a Byron Bay retailer and they had an extra warehouse purely for managing returns and they were getting a lot of. We're actually speaking to them now. We're getting a lot of complaints because they couldn't do that. Couldn't even. In addition to the auspost time and the bank processing times in between that they couldn't process them. So even once it got to them two weeks later, it was still in their warehouse for like seven to 10 days waiting to be processed. Yeah. So it's a tough one. It really is.
Nathan Bush: And from the conversations that you've had, what's been the trickiest, almost surprising category of products? You don't have to give us brand names that you've seen in terms of refund process because normally we just see it as a pretty straightforward process, but we always know there's outliers there. Have you found any outliers that have really surprised you?
Brad Carney: I think it's nice to see for brands or like industry or not industries like subsectors that don't have high return rates to still make such a difference, you know, like, let's say like cosmetics or linen or anything like that, you know, the customer response for the, you know, few customers that use it. It's just so incredible to see, like, those reviews coming in. Yeah. You know, it can make such a difference to see, like, those few happy customers. Even though you're not on, let's say, coaching, where you're getting heaps of returns and refunds from customers and really good responses, which you know you're going to get. Even for the retailers that don't have those large amount of returns to still reap the benefits there.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Absolutely. Brad, thank you for sharing that. I have to ask you, we've kind of touched on it, but what's next for refunded? We've talked about internationalization and investment. Say, what's the next 12 months? What's on your radar next 12 months?
Brad Carney: I think it's really killing out the Australian market. So getting as many retailers as possible where Refunded's a brand name, really, so customers can go to a store and be like, yes, there's refunded. And it's a really exciting thing that is a priority and I think we're really doing that in Q1. So we're launching with a lot of really incredible stores that we're super excited about in the next two to three months. And we just want to use that as a nice platform for the year to end up with at least 100 top tier retailers by the end of the year.
Nathan Bush: And I have to ask, does having Afterpay Ventures as an investment partner help do that? Will there ever be a linking between the two?
Brad Carney: Yeah, whole comments on the linking but I think, I think definitely what Afterpay does for us, especially in the early days, not as much now as we've grown but in those first few months it gave us that reputation and said, oh these guys aren't messing around, you know that this is real, we can trust them. That level of advocacy that really helps a lot and definitely the guidance and that retail expertise that we can learn. What do retailers actually want? What is actually going to benefit the retailer? Because we know the customer is going to love it. It's like what's going to benefit the retailer?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, brilliant. Now Brad, if people want to get in touch, you mentioned retailers can onboard really quickly. You mentioned the half hour phone call there. What's the best way for retailers to learn more about refunded and start using if it's right for them?
Brad Carney: What you can do is you can reach out through our website, you can go to I'm a business page and at the bottom there you can select merchant interest and just shoot in your email address and I'll shoot you out an email. One of my team will shoot you out an email and then we can get going there, have a little brief call like we're having now, discuss the benefits, what may work for you, how we can structure it to maximize your return and then go from there.
Nathan Bush: Great stuff Brad. Mate, it's really exciting and I'm so glad we got to speak to you at this stage of the journey. No doubt there's a lot more to come. Thank you for sharing the story so far and can't wait to see what 2022 brings.
Brad Carney: Thanks Nathan. Great to be. Absolutely love the podcast so feeling privileged to be on it finally.
Nathan Bush: Thanks mate.
Nathan Bush: Now when I said I was sweltering doing that interview in my parents in law's bedroom in Bundaberg, I was not kidding. I was in a bloody hot box doing that. But I think it turned out pretty good. And how good was Brad and what he's come up with at refunded? I just love it when people come up with simple solutions to old problems. Even better when they are in our own backyard and they are taking it to the world. Can't wait to see what refunded turns into within the next 12 months. Here are three takeaways that I took
Nathan Bush: from my conversation with Brad.
Nathan Bush: Be in the Customer's shoes I know it seems obvious, but the refunded idea came from solving a customer pain point when the co founders themselves were customers. I find too many e commerce people actually don't shop online that often and that surprises me constantly. It's so important to be regularly purchasing from different retailers to understand the different experiences, options and opportunities. Whenever you can, just shop online. Number two return policies are key Brad shared how approximately 60% of customers check the return policy before buying. His advice was to make sure that you have one to start with and two to make it as transparent as possible. He goes beyond having a link in the footer to a returns policy to making sure that it is always accessible, especially on the pdp the product detail page Number three the Value of Warm Connections Brad has developed an amazing retailer and investment connection in a short amount of time. Just like weet Vicks, his advice on Connections was that warmer is always better than cold and I think that has always helped that he's had ideal customers such as Culture Kings and Afterpay in mind when talking to ideal contacts. So find your ideal customers or your contacts. Then work out how you use your network to get warm intros into them.
Nathan Bush: Foreign.
Nathan Bush: To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to addtocart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies, tools and research, sign up to the High Five Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can can take action from. Sign up at 12 high 12h I g h.comau forward/high five and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding.
