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Etsy Product Returns Spike Investigation

Root Cause Analysis · beginner

You're the PM for buyer experience at Etsy. Over the past 24 hours, you've noticed a 20% spike in product returns across the platform. How would you investigate this and what steps would you take?

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Community approaches

Ishant Juyal’s approach

Okay, the first step I will take is to understand the data first. What is the data that I'm looking at? How do I define the product returns? Is the spike in the number of orders, or is the spike in the drop in the percentage of orders that are returned? I would need to know the exact definition of product returns.

Now, my goal would be to dissect the data into the following sections:

  1. The type of product being returned
  2. The purchase date of products being returned
  3. The location from which these returns are happening
  4. The delivery date on which these orders were received
  5. The sellers of these products

This would help me know if there is a specific cohort of people who are facing this problem.

In the UX, as we cancel the order, there are cancellation reasons that the user has to select, so I'll also look at the data and see if there are any spikes in the type of cancellation reasons or complaints that users are doing.

I will also go to the customer support and check if there has been any rise in the kind of issues that they are seeing that the customer has raised.

And also look at the events-level data of the UX the users have seen, because if there is a UX change which is now making it easier for the user to return, it needs to be investigated.

So, the answer is to understand the data about the source where this spike is coming from. Based on that, we will get a hypothesis or multiple hypothesis which we will test to find the root cause.