Customer fraud is among the biggest challenges e-commerce faces today, over 14% of returns received by e-commerce companies are fraudulent. To help reduce the frauds, Shadowfax now performs a quality check at the customer’s doorstep. “In the very first month of the feature launch, clients have been astonished to see fraudulent returns reduce to 1% of all returns, resulting in a big boost to their profitability,” said Sumit Badwal, Senior Developer at Shadowfax. They have achieved this by providing:
Customization: Shadowfax works with clients across a spectrum of categories — apparel, electronics, and grocery to name a few. Shadowfax developed a solution where QC guidelines can be defined based on a combination of client, product category, price range and the reason for return.
Intelligent secondary QC: The savings are driven by quality check at the customer doorstep, but to ensure that the riders are following the QC guidelines as maker-checker balance is needed. Secondary QC ensures that riders know that their doorstep QC is evaluated by the hub staff. Shadowfax has developed an intelligent system that flags returns for secondary QC based on item price, return customer, rider picking up the order and many other factors.
Optimal image upload solution: “Each of Shadowfax’s riders pick up 40 to 50 SKUs daily. They capture at least 3 images of the product at the customer’s doorstep. The rider app does not try to upload images as soon as they are clicked. Instead, it uploads them asynchronously only when a strong network is available. Further, to reduce the payload Shadowfax compresses the images using a proprietary algorithm,” continued Sumit.
Karma Score: “Being the leaders in Reverse Pickups, Shadowfax has accumulated primary data on consumer behavior. The team is working to build an intelligent system to analyze this data and assign each consumer a karma score based on their behavior. This karma score will play a large role in determining how stringent the doorstep quality check should be,” concluded Nidhi Lashkari, Senior Lead — Engineering at Shadowfax.
About Shadowfax
Shadowfax is India’s largest crowdsourced delivery platform with presence in 70+ cities across India and 7000+ daily active delivery personnel. Shadowfax’s unique app enables delivery of food, grocery, pharmacy and e-commerce for businesses and helps them create customer delight using technology. With relentless focus on engineering pleasant experiences for the customers, Shadowfax envisions to become the most desirable and trustworthy delivery platform for customers.
