Yes, Ingrid’s Tracking module can track any order, outbound or return.
What is Return shipment?
Return is a shipment with opposite direction to usual shipments. Where the Customer is the Sender and the Merchant is Recipient. It is a mirror reflection to outbound shipment scenario.
Merchants have the opportunity to own the communication also at the next stage of the post-purchase journey. While for the Customers we extend Tracking experience even after the shipment has been delivered. In case the Customers decide to sent back the purchased goods, they can track return along with deliveries.
- The return is a separate shipment from outbound and has its individual tracking number.
- The return shipment in most cases happens after the outbound shipment. The Customer must first receive the goods to be able to return them.
- The content of the return shipment could vary from the outbound shipment. The Customer could have received more goods and return just some of them.
When do Returns happen in Tracking?
There are two potential sources for a return shipment to be tracked by Ingrid:
1) the Return shipment is booked in Ingrid TA
2) the tracking number of the externally booked Return shipment is provided to Ingrid via API (https://developer.ingrid.com/delivery_tracking/integration/#providing-orders-to-track)
In both cases, the most important is that the "Direction_type" field is set to "RETURN". That is the main indicator for Tracking to distinguish between the outbound and return shipments.
The external_id / tos_id should still be the same as for the related original outbound shipment.
How do we present Returns in Tracking?
Returns shipment is always presented in the context of the order (external_id, tos_id) along with all outbound shipments (tracking numbers) connected to that order.
What is also important, outbound tracking experience will automatically be enriched with return tracking experience, after the Return shipment happens.
It means that:
- Merchant doesn't need to add extra communication about the return tracking
- Customer can use the link to Tracking received for outbound shipment and have the Return shipment there out of the box
There could be also multiple return shipments for each order. All be presented in a separate sections "Returns" clearly separated from "Deliveries" (outbound shipments)
Returns shipments has a separate harmonised progress steps that are presented on the Tracking Widget:
- Return requested
- Submitted to Carrier
- On it's way to Merchant
- Returned to Merchant