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Where to find it: Main → Shipping → Returns — Open in OTO ↗
This is the half of a return that decides whether it cost you a parcel or a product. Everything before it was a conversation; from here someone is holding the box.

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One form, six stages

A return is worked through a single View Return Details form rather than across several screens. A progress bar across the top names every stage and marks where this one has got to.
The return details form, mid-lifecycle

Fig. 1 — Six stages: Request Created → Pending Approval → Reverse Shipment → Received → Items Confirmed → Refunded. This return is at stage three.

The form tells you what to do nextAbove the detail sits a banner naming the current stage and the actions available at it — here “The return request is approved. Create a reverse shipment to collect the items from the customer”, with Create Return Shipment and Reject Return beside it.That is the difference between a status field and a workflow. Nobody has to know what stage four requires; the form says so, and offers only the actions that make sense there.

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What the form holds

Return Request Source is worth readingIt records whether the customer raised this themselves or someone on your team did it for them. Over a few hundred returns that ratio is a measurement of whether the portal is working: a high proportion of agent-raised returns means customers are not finding it, or not trusting it, and are calling instead.

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Four quantities, not one

The Return Items table carries every number separately, per SKU:
The gap between requested and returned is the whole disciplineMost systems keep one quantity and overwrite it, which means that by the time a refund is issued nobody can tell whether the customer asked for two and sent one, or asked for one and sent two.Keeping all four side by side means the discrepancy is visible at the moment of the refund rather than reconstructable afterwards — and it is the single most useful piece of evidence in a fraud case or a supplier claim.

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1 · Create the reverse shipment

The return label is generated inside the form. You choose the shipment option — OTO Rates or Own Rates, exactly as on an outbound order — and the destination, which can be any warehouse or branch. The Return Label (airway bill) prints from the Quick Actions menu.
The return does not have to come back where it came fromSending every return to the warehouse that shipped it is the obvious default and often the wrong one. A returns-processing hub, the nearest warehouse to the customer, or the branch that can resell the item immediately may all be better — and choosing the destination per return is what makes that possible.This is the whole of reverse logistics in one field: the route back is a decision, not a reflection of the route out.

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2 · Receive it

When the parcel arrives, the form records the Receiving Date and Time, the exact warehouse or branch that took it in, and internal notes on the physical condition of what was received. Those notes are for you rather than the customer, and they are what a refund dispute is settled with three weeks later.

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3 · Confirm the items

The critical step, and the one that must come before any money moves. It matches the quantity requested against the quantity actually received, and verifies the return reason the customer gave at the start against what is in the box.

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4 · Process the refund

Only now. The form shows the refund amount calculated by your e-commerce platform, you select the method — Money Back, Exchange or Store Credit — and confirm, which moves the request to Completed.
Partial is the normal case, not the exceptionA customer returning three of five items, or returning something with a missing accessory, is ordinary. Confirming quantities per SKU rather than accepting the request wholesale is what turns that from a write-off into a partial refund.The options run the full range — accept it, refund part of it, refund all of it, or send it back — and they exist because returned goods genuinely arrive in all four of those states.

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Confirming in the warehouse

The desktop path runs from Shipping → Shipments → Returned:
Bulk confirmation trusts the requestConfirm Return Multiple accepts every item in every selected order without anyone counting. On a backlog of straightforward returns that is exactly the right tool; on anything where quantity or condition is in question it converts an inspection into an assumption.Worth reserving for volume, and keeping single confirmation for anything that matters.

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In the app

Return is one of the nine actions in the OTO PACK app. The operator picks the order and confirms items by scanning — or by manual selection where scanning is not possible — and inventory updates in real time. Scanning is the point. A return confirmed by eye against a list is a return where the wrong SKU can be put back into sellable stock, and that error is invisible until someone tries to pick it.

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What a confirmed return does to stock

Why the Return bin matters commerciallyStock in a Return bin is counted but not sellable, so sync does not offer it to a storefront while it is waiting to be inspected.That is what prevents the worst version of this: reselling a returned item before anyone has established that it is fit to sell, and turning one unhappy customer into two.

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Failed deliveries coming home

A parcel that could not be delivered comes back whether anyone asks for it or not. That is return to origin, and it is handled automatically rather than as a customer request — the order is marked returned, and the goods re-enter through the same receiving path as anything else. On the delivery side, a driver handing an undelivered parcel back at the warehouse uses Drop & Return Order, which requires a return reason before it will complete — see Delivery.
Count these separatelyA return-to-origin is a delivery failure wearing a return’s clothes. Its causes are addresses, phone numbers and time windows; a customer return’s causes are fit, expectation and quality.Reported together they produce a returns rate that nobody can act on, because the two halves need entirely different fixes — one belongs to address verification, the other to your product pages.

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Refunds and credit memos

Where the sales channel supports it, confirming a refund writes it back: the refund is issued and a credit memo created on the e-commerce platform automatically, so the finance record matches the physical one without anyone re-keying it. That is the step most returns processes lose. A refund agreed in one system and recorded in another is a reconciliation problem that surfaces at month end, by which point the parcel, the person and the reason are all long gone.