Apparel & footwear brands

Returns are eating your growth. Find out exactly where — and who.

SimpleSense reads 12 months of orders and returns and shows you the serial refunders, the bracketing patterns, and the three SKUs driving half your return bill — plus the ranked list of moves the data says to make this week.

Built for apparel and footwear brands doing $2–20M. Flat price. No % of your GMV, no % of "recovered revenue."

Get your free auditSee a sample apparel & footwear brands audit
Sample audit

Meridian Standard Apparela synthetic demo store.

Every figure below is computed by SimpleSense’s real analysis pipeline on a synthetic demo store, not hand-written — the same pipeline that reads your own data.

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The 2% eating the 98%

1.5% of customers generate 8.7% of return dollars ($124,836/yr) → move this named cohort to inspection-first refunds; leave instant refunds on for everyone else.

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Bracketing tax

9% of jacket orders are multi-size same-style with systematic returns → size-guide intervention + "fit promise" exchange flow on Trail Runner Jacket before you touch policy.

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Three SKUs, half the bill

51.7% of return dollars come from 3 SKUs, and the reason text clusters on SIZE_TOO_LARGE → fix the product page, not the customer.

3 more moves found in your data

The free plan shows your top moves. Basic unlocks the full ranked list, geo + Pareto detail, and segment exports.

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Built for stores like yours

Not a generic audit.

Apparel returns run 20–40% of online orders, footwear 17–30% — at a 25% return rate, a $6M brand is re-handling $1.5M of merchandise a year (illustrative math on the cited range).
Source: Richpanel
Repeat rates in apparel run 20–26% — retention programs get built while the returns line quietly cancels them out.
Source: Eightx
Most $2–20M brands manage returns policy by anecdote — the serial-abuser cohort and the honest-sizing-confusion cohort get treated identically, which punishes good customers and subsidizes bad ones.
Editorial — not a statistical claim
How it works

From your data to your next move.

01

It reads everything you've already got.

Connect Shopify in one click. Simple Sense ingests your full order, customer, and product history — 3–5 years — read-only.

02

It finds the patterns that matter.

Deterministic analyzers surface the non-obvious — geographic concentration, under-served VIPs, the SKU losing money.

03

You get a ranked list of moves — and why.

The few highest-ROI moves land in one read, ranked by expected impact — the pattern, why it matters, exactly what to do.

Paired audit

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Where the numbers come from

Cited, not invented.

Apparel return rate: 20–40%; footwear: 17–30%
Source: Richpanel
Apparel category repeat-purchase rate: 20–26%
Source: Eightx
FAQ

Questions apparel & footwear brands ask.

Is this going to tell us to punish customers?

No — outputs are review cohorts, never an auto-deny list. False positives punish good customers, so every flagged cohort is for manual review, not automated action.

What exports do you need and how long does it take?

Two CSVs — 12 months of order and return exports. First pass is typically the same week.

We use Loop/Returnly — does this replace it?

No — those platforms process returns. SimpleSense tells you what your returns mean: who the serial refunders are, which SKUs are the real problem, and what policy change actually addresses it.

What about exchanges vs. refunds?

Both are read from your return export and reflected in the analysis — an exchange isn’t treated identically to a refund in the underlying data.

Flat price vs. a % of recovery — why?

A recovery-percentage fee creates an incentive to over-flag borderline customers. A flat price keeps the incentive aligned with getting the analysis right, not maximizing flags.

Built by an operator who has run stores like Nike and JCPenney.

Why you can trust the numbers

Proof you can verify yourself.

Every number is earned
Each figure is computed from your own Shopify data. When the data to support a number isn’t there, we show “insufficient” — never a fabricated 0 or an estimate.
Encrypted, never logged
Your Shopify access token is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and never logged. All traffic runs over TLS, and the database is encrypted at rest.
Your data stays yours
Every read and write is scoped to your store. One merchant’s data is never joined to another’s — not for analysis, not for anything.
The model only sees aggregates
SimpleSense sends the model aggregate metrics only — never raw customer records. And we don’t sell your store’s data.
See it before you commit
Get a free audit of your own store — real moves from your real numbers — with no credit card. Disconnect from Connections anytime and your ingested data is purged.
Built by an operator
SimpleSense is built by an operator who has run $1–15M Shopify stores — the moves are the ones a sharp operator would actually make.