Manage Return Shipments with WooCommerce FedEx Plugin

In this article, we will show you how you can use the WooCommerce Shipping plugin for FedEx to manage your return shipments. You will see how you can send the shipping labels to your customers so that they can ship the items back.

The WooCommerce Shipping plugin for FedEx is a complete shipping solution for any online store. You can use it to display live shipping rates, offer freight shipping, print shipping labels, and much more.

There are a few businesses that offer services in which the customers have to return the shipments back to the store or service centers. There are cases where store owners have their warehouse or supplier located someplace else(other countries) and provide services or repairs to the customers locally(from within the country). Hence, store owners often find it difficult to arrange a return delivery in such cases.

Let’s have a look at the example where one of our customers had a similar requirement.

Daniel: Hi. I am trying to find out whether this plugin will work for me. I need to find a way to offer free returns shipping my Hong Kong customers. They will be returning the items to a US postal address, however the initial order will be shipped from my logistics partner in Hong Kong (so the initial shipment will not be coming from FedEx). Is this still possible to use this just for the returns?

In this case, the shop owner wants to offer free returns shipping for his customers in the U.S.A., and allow his logistics partner in Hong Kong to ship the initial shipment. So let’s see how the plugin can fulfil his demands.

Determine Ship From Address

After that you have installed the plugin and the complete setup process is done, you have to now open the FedEx plugin settings page and navigate down to the Ship From Address Preference. Here you need to select the Shipping Address.

ship_from_preference

Doing this will change the ship from address to your customers address and the ship to address to your store address(in this case, the U.S.A.). The same effect will be applied on the shipping label, meaning, your customer can use the generate label to send the shipment back to you.

Send Shipping Labels to your Customers

Now in order to share the shipping label with your customers you need to go down and select the Customer option under the Send Shipping Label To. Doing this will send the shipping labels to your customers once the shipment has been generated in the backend.

print_label

You may also enable the Allow customer to print label from his myaccount->order page, which allows users to print the shipping labels from their My Account page on your website. Once you have received the order and you can follow the steps to generate and print the shipping label.

Now See it work

You need to click on Create Shipment to initiate the process.

generate_label

After creating the shipment you would see the following section where you can simply print the shipping label.

print_label

Here’s how the sample shipping label for return shipment would look like. And as you can see, the ship from address is a Hong Kong address and the ship to address is the U.S.A. address.

return_shipping_label

The WooCommerce Shipping Plugin for FedEx makes the return process quite simple. However, in any case you are finding it difficult to do that then feel free to contact our customer support for more.