For DTC brands that fulfill in-house

You built a great returns experience for your customers. What happens after the box arrives at your warehouse is costing you more than you know.

Returns Desk is the warehouse-floor platform that DTC brands with their own fulfillment operations have been missing. Scanner-based grading. Fraud documentation. Automated disposition. No hardware. No long implementation. Month-to-month.

$40
Average fully loaded cost per return
17%
Average return rate for DTC apparel brands
$150,000
Fraud recovered by one client in 90 days
Hours
Time to get operational on Returns Desk, not weeks

Cost and return rate figures are DTC apparel industry benchmarks, not a projection for any specific operation. The Owen Allen Solutions result is a documented client outcome.

Who this is for

The right fit, in four lines.

Returns Desk for DTC is built for a specific kind of brand: the one that owns its own fulfillment and is feeling return volume as a real operational cost, not a rounding error.

If that sounds like you, the checklist on the right will read like your own operation.

  • Your brand operates its own warehouse and processes returns in-house
  • You have a consumer-facing returns portal in place: Loop Returns, AfterShip, Happy Returns, or similar
  • You are in the $10M to $75M revenue range and feeling the pain of return volume at scale
  • You have no dedicated warehouse-floor returns processing platform

The gap your portal does not fill

Your portal solved the customer experience. Not the warehouse.

Your Loop Returns or AfterShip portal solved the customer experience. The buyer gets a label, tracks the return, and sees a status update. That part works.

What your portal does not solve is what happens after the box hits your warehouse floor. Who grades the item? How is the condition documented? How is fraud flagged and the claim built? How does a disposition decision get made consistently across every shift, every SKU, every return?

Most brands at your scale are answering those questions with tribal knowledge and a spreadsheet. Returns Desk replaces that with a scanner-based guided workflow that makes every receiving decision consistent, documented, and defensible.

Loop Returns AfterShip Happy Returns Shopify

How it works

From dock to decision in five steps.

Scanner-based receiving

Your team scans each return at the dock. No keyboard entry. The workflow guides them through grading.

Image capture

Every return is photographed at the point of inspection. This is your fraud documentation and condition audit trail.

Disposition routing

Based on your configured rules, each item is routed automatically: return to stock, B-stock, liquidation, recycle, or quarantine for fraud review.

Fraud claim file

When fraud is flagged, Returns Desk generates a PDF with images, inspection details, and chain of custody, ready to submit for recovery.

Brand visibility

Your ops team sees real-time inventory status on all returns without calling the warehouse.

Proof point

The Returns Desk Platform has been a game-changer for us. The team at Octolan created a disruptive returns solution that makes our team more efficient and helps us win new business.

Jesse Mason, Co-Founder, Owen Allen Solutions

The result: $200,000 in additional revenue. $150,000 in fraud recovered. First 90 days.

Read the full case study

Questions DTC brands ask us

Straight answers before you talk to sales.

We already have a returns portal (Loop, AfterShip, Happy Returns). Do we still need this?

Yes. Those tools manage the customer-facing experience, not what happens after the box lands in your warehouse. Returns Desk handles grading, fraud documentation, and disposition once the physical item arrives.

Is Returns Desk a good fit if we outsource fulfillment to a 3PL?

Returns Desk is built for brands that process returns in-house. If your 3PL handles receiving, ask them whether they run Returns Desk, since that is who would operate the scanner-based workflow.

How long does implementation take?

Hours. Returns Desk is self-provisioning, so there is no onboarding project or hardware order standing between signup and your first processed return.

What size brand is this built for?

Brands doing roughly $10 million to $75 million in revenue with their own warehouse operation and real return volume, not enterprise scale, not pre-revenue.

Do we need to buy scanners or other hardware?

No. Use whatever 2D scanners, tablets, or mobile devices are already on your floor.

Get started

Returns Desk is operational in hours, not months.

No hardware. No implementation project. Month-to-month pricing. Sign up and start processing returns the same day.