Shadowfax, India’s largest crowdsourced delivery platform, providing same day delivery and next day delivery that has now developed a new tech driven, highly customisable capability that enables its delivery partners to perform intelligent quality checks at the customer’s doorstep for customer returned products. The product intends to enable seamless pickup for Shadowfax’s clients while also reducing their overall first mile costs.

Over the last few years, Indian e-commerce growth has been fueled by offerings like COD payment, doorstep delivery, no questions asked return policies aimed at providing better customer experience. In fact, in a recent survey 89% of the customers who shop regularly on e-commerce websites revealed that return policies of the e-tailers influence their purchase patterns ahead of other factors like product price and brand availability.

India’s e-commerce penetration is going to grow many fold in coming years. With features like free returns the end consumer will be willing to risk buying new products with the knowledge that they can return the same if they don’t find it satisfactory especially for categories like apparel where standardisation is still a challenge. As per data gathered by Shadowfax, it is not uncommon for customers to return used or duplicate products believing the pickup agent is too naive to make a judgment call on the product hence committing fraud.

“Today on an average, 11–12% of all online purchases are returned by customers. The percentage rises to an alarming 20–25% for online app category. As per data collected by Shadowfax, nearly 14% of returns received by e-commerce companies are fraudulent and with e-commerce companies expected to continue with no questions asked free returns policies, this number is only expected to rise” explained Partha Mohanty, an ISB alumnus, currently AVP-Product at Shadowfax.

Considering an average of 2 million deliveries happen every day and with e-commerce companies increasingly focusing on margins, there is a huge opportunity to reduce costs while maintaining the perfect experience for the end consumer. With this new product release, Shadowfax is aiming to achieve both of them without compromising on any front.

“Our ‘Quality Check at Doorstep’ product allows e-commerce companies to decide process flows to be followed at customer doorstep for each pickup. Once the quality check of the pickup is completed at doorstep by our rider, the result snapshot is shared with clients and the end customers, bringing in transparency to the whole process. In the very first month of feature launch, Shadowfax has seen the fraudulent returns reduced to an astonishing 1% from 14%. We are further working on developing a Customer Behavior Index (CBI) to predict frauds to be committed by consumers basis their historical behavior, which is expected to be released pretty soon” concluded Partha.

Shadowfax is India’s largest crowd-sourced delivery platform, offering same day delivery and next day delivery services with a strong presence in 13+ cities across India. Backed by a network of over 5000+ daily active delivery personnel, Shadowfax is a trusted partner for businesses across various sectors, including food, grocery, pharmacy, and e-commerce.

The platform also specialises in Shadowfax reverse logistics, providing efficient and scalable reverse logistics solutions to streamline returns management for businesses.

Powered by a unique app, Shadowfax leverages cutting-edge technology to create seamless experiences and ensure customer satisfaction. With an unwavering commitment to engineering pleasant interactions, Shadowfax aims to become the most desirable and trustworthy delivery platform in India.