Forum Moderators: buckworks
Our approach so far has been to start out with a fairly simple and broad policy covering orders, payment, shipping and returns. But as time has passed and the business grows, we find a fairly constant stream of "new" scenarios that need to be covered, so we end up changing (mostly adding to) the policy a couple times each month.
For instance, I originally had a simple "if you don't like it, return it" policy which worked for the first year or so. And then some fool ordered a "special order" product that I don't normally stock and would be unlikely to ever sell to another customer, and wanted to return it a week or two later because it wasn't what they expected. So we updated the policy to exclude "special orders" from the return policy.
And we've had a small rash recently of orders returned to us by the USPS as "undeliverable" -- we ship to the exact address as entered by the customer, so if it can't be delivered it's their fault. The complicating factor is that we offer free shipping, but there's no way I'm shipping an order *twice* for free, so there's another update to the order policy.
Is my experience and approach fairly normal for a small and growing e-commerce business? Or is there some "boilerplate" policy document somewhere that I could refer to and cover a few more bases?
Trial, error, and fix can be a fine way to go as your business grows.
