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Where to find it: Settings → Return Settings → Return Automation — Open in OTO ↗
A return policy that lives in a document is a policy someone has to remember and apply. A return policy expressed as rules is one the portal enforces before a request is ever created.

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Rules

Settings → Return Settings → Return Automation holds a list of Existing Rules, searchable, each on its own card, and an Add New Rule button.
A return automation rule

Fig. 1 — A rule reads as a sentence: If Item Name Equal ball, And SKU Equal ball → Unable To Return.

Each card carries the rule’s name, an Active status, its conditions in plain language, the resulting Action and the date it was created, with controls to duplicate, edit or delete it.

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Building one

Adding a rule

Fig. 2 — Conditions are rows of Condition Type · Operator · Value, stacked with Add New.

Condition types cover both the item and the shipment: Item Name, SKU, Brands, Origin Country, Destination Country, Shipment Weight, Order value and the custom reference fields, among others.
The interesting conditions are the ones that are not about the productItem Name and SKU express the obvious policy: this thing cannot come back. Destination Country, Shipment Weight and Order value express something harder and more valuable — the returns that are uneconomic rather than impermissible.A heavy, low-value item crossing a border can easily cost more to retrieve than to write off. A rule on weight and order value lets you decide that once, in advance, instead of one apologetic exception at a time.
The action observed in the product is Unable To Return: the matched items cannot be returned at all.
Non-returnable is a real category, and it needs teethUnderwear, pierced jewellery, perishables, personalised items, opened software, made-to-order furniture — every catalog has lines that genuinely cannot come back, for hygiene, safety or simple economics.Stated only in a policy document, that rule gets tested constantly and enforced inconsistently, which is worse than not having it. Expressed as a rule, the portal declines it up front and the customer is told at the moment they would otherwise have raised a request.

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What else the policy is made of

Rules are one of three things enforcing your policy, and they work together:
Enforce at the portal, not at the warehouseEvery rule that is applied when the request is made saves a collection, a transit, a receipt and a difficult conversation. Every rule applied after the parcel has arrived has already cost you all four.So the test for a new rule is simple: could the customer have been told this before they packed the box?

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Choosing the carrier for the way back

A reverse shipment needs a carrier just as an outbound one does, and it is chosen the same way. Shipping automation handles the return leg, and its test tool carries a Reverse Shipment toggle so a rule set can be checked against a return rather than a delivery. That matters because the two legs are genuinely different problems. The outbound leg optimises for speed to a customer who is waiting; the return leg optimises for cost, because nobody is. A carrier that is right for one is frequently wrong for the other, and pricing for the return is set separately — the Return Order Fee sits alongside delivery price in shipping prices.

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Return fraud detection

Return fraud is a real and growing cost: the box that comes back empty, the item swapped for a counterfeit, the customer whose return rate is an order of magnitude above everyone else’s, the wardrobing that returns worn goods as new. Detecting it means spotting patterns a person working one return at a time cannot see — across a customer’s history, across reasons, across the gap between what was requested and what arrived.
Detection is a signal, not a verdictThe cost of wrongly refusing an honest customer is far higher than the cost of one fraudulent return, and it is paid in a place that does not show up in the returns report.So the useful output of fraud detection is a flag that puts a return in front of a human with the reason attached — not an automatic rejection. Worth configuring with that asymmetry firmly in mind.