Source material
Rewriting a returns policy so no passage of it misleads on its own
A returns policy is never read as a document. It is split into passages, and each passage is matched against a question on the strength of its own words. So the paragraph naming your window gets found by somebody asking about a swimming costume, answers them cleanly, and the exclusion three headings below is not in the room. This is fixable in an afternoon, and it is structural work rather than writing work.
Why this one is harder than it looks
The classic shape is the window and the exclusions living apart. Most returns policies open with a generous, quotable sentence about how many days somebody has, then spend the rest of the page taking things back out of it: sale items, personalised goods, sealed products, anything returned without its packaging. A passage carrying only the opening sentence reads as a complete answer, because grammatically it is one. Nothing in it signals that it is half of a rule.
Conditional clauses are the second problem and they are worse, because a policy written by a careful person is full of them and they are usually stranded from what they modify. A sentence beginning with the word unless, sitting under a heading three screens away from the rule it limits, is either meaningless on its own or, retrieved next to the wrong neighbour, actively wrong. The same goes for except, provided that, and subject to.
Third, the difference between a faulty item and an unwanted one is a legal distinction in many markets and usually no more than one heading in your document, if it appears at all. Where you trade, a customer with a faulty item may have statutory remedies that exist independently of a shop's own goodwill policy, that can be wider than it, and that can last longer than its window. If the document files both under a single heading called Returns, half of every passage taken from it answers the wrong question.
Fourth, and this one is almost universal: who pays the return postage. It is the most asked returns question and the least written line in the category. If it is not in the text it cannot be retrieved, and below the match threshold the assistant refuses without calling the model at all, which is the honest outcome and still costs you a message and a reply.
What it has to contain
Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.
| One heading per outcome, not one per clause | Headings named for what somebody wants to do: returning something you changed your mind about, returning something faulty, exchanging for a different size, cancelling before it ships. Extraction prefers semantic structure, so a heading is what holds a passage together, and a heading named after an outcome pulls the right block for the right question. |
|---|---|
| The window, the condition and the exclusions in one section | The number of days you publish, the state the item has to be in, and the list of things the window does not apply to, all under the same heading and within a few sentences of each other. Not a window at the top of the page and an exclusions block at the bottom of it. |
| A faulty goods section written in customer vocabulary | Broken, damaged, stopped working, not as described, arrived faulty, stopped charging. Those are the words people type. The section also has to carry, verbatim, whatever wording you already publish about statutory rights in many markets sitting alongside a shop policy rather than being replaced by it. |
| A return postage line stated as a plain fact | Who pays, in which case, and whether it comes out of the refund or is paid up front. Write it twice: once for a change of mind and once for a fault, because in many markets the answer differs between the two and a single sentence covering both will be wrong for one of them. |
| A condition line that names actual things | Tags still attached, original box, seal unbroken, unworn, unwashed. Named objects match the questions people ask. The phrase saleable condition matches nothing, because no customer has ever typed it. |
The rewrite, in order
Reorganise by outcome before you change a single word
Open the document and do nothing but move blocks. Everything about a change of mind goes under one heading. Everything about a fault goes under another. Exchanges get their own. Order cancellations before dispatch get their own. You will find, doing this, that several paragraphs belong under two headings, and the right answer is to write them twice rather than to pick one.
Duplication feels wrong to anybody who writes policy for a living, because a contract with the same rule stated twice is a contract with a drafting problem. A page that is going to be read one passage at a time is the opposite case. Repetition is what makes a passage self-sufficient, and self-sufficiency is the whole property you are trying to buy.
Do this pass first, because it changes what the later passes are working on. Rewriting sentences inside a structure you are about to demolish is wasted effort.
Pull every exception up against the rule it limits
Search the document for unless, except, other than, does not apply, and subject to. Each hit is a sentence that is currently at risk of travelling without its subject. For each one, either move it so it sits immediately after the rule it limits, or restate the rule inside it so it can stand up alone.
The test is blunt and it works: cover everything on the page except that one paragraph, read it, and ask whether somebody could act on it and be wrong. If they could, the paragraph is not finished. A sentence that reads correctly only because you can see the heading above it will not have that heading when it is retrieved.
The same test catches the other common defect, which is a rule that names a category the reader cannot resolve. Promotional items, final sale, clearance stock. If the document does not say somewhere in the same block how a customer tells whether their item was one of those, the exclusion is not usable.
Give faulty items their own section and never merge it back
This is the one section worth being slightly repetitive and slightly over-explicit about, because the cost of getting it wrong is not a bad answer, it is a bad answer about somebody's rights. In many markets the remedies available for goods that are faulty, not as described, or not fit for purpose come from law rather than from you, and a shop policy cannot cut them down. Where you trade, the specifics vary, and the safe move is to publish the wording your own advisers have given you rather than a general summary borrowed from somewhere.
Structurally, what matters is that the section is findable by a customer's own description of the problem. Somebody whose kettle stopped working does not type the words statutory or remedy. They type it stopped working. If those words are nowhere in your faulty goods section, the passage that gets matched will be the change of mind section, and it will quote your window at somebody the window does not govern.
Keep the route in the section too: what to send, what to include, and where it goes. A fault section that describes rights and not process sends everybody to a second conversation.
Write the three lines nobody writes
Return postage: who pays it, for a fault and for a change of mind, and how it is handled in practice. Original delivery charge: whether it comes back, and in which cases. Proof: what somebody needs to have kept, and what you accept instead when they have not kept it.
These three are missing from most returns policies not because anybody decided to omit them but because they are operational habits rather than drafted positions. Somebody in the business knows the answer to all three and has never had to write it down. That is exactly the material that pays for itself the moment it is in the document, because it converts the most common follow up message into an answer that was already there.
Write each one as a flat statement in its own sentence. Not a clause inside a longer paragraph about the returns process, which is where a good sentence goes to be unretrievable.
What happens if you skip it
The window quoted perfectly, with the exclusion still in the document
Somebody asks whether they can send back a sale item. The passage about your window is the strongest match, because it is the passage that talks about sending things back, and it says what it says. The answer comes out confident, correct as far as it goes, and cited to the passage it came from. The exclusion that would have changed the answer was never retrieved, so as far as the assistant could tell it did not exist.
What that costs is not the argument about one item. It is that the customer has a cited answer, with a passage number attached to it, and they are entitled to have believed it. The document caused this, not the retrieval, and the document is the only place it can be fixed. Moving the exclusion into the same section as the window costs about ten minutes and removes the entire category.
Check it against this
Before you index it
- Every heading names an outcome a customer would recognise
- The window, the condition and the exclusions sit under one heading
- No sentence starting with unless or except is more than a sentence away from what it limits
- Faulty items have their own section, written in the words customers use
- Who pays return postage is written for a fault and for a change of mind
- Sale, personalised and hygiene exclusions are named as things, not as a category
- The statutory rights wording you publish appears inside the section it applies to
Questions
- Should I upload the policy as a file or let my site be crawled?
- Whichever one you will actually keep up to date. Two documents whose extracted text is identical are stored once, so uploading the same wording that is already on your site does not double anything. The risk is the opposite case: an uploaded copy that has drifted from the published page is different text, so it is stored as well, and both can be retrieved.
- My exclusions are in a table inside a PDF. Is that fine?
- It depends on whether the table is text or a picture of a table. A file is read page by page as text, and text inside an image is not read at all, so a scanned or exported graphic of your exclusions is invisible. If it is real text, it will be read, but a table is still a weaker home for an exclusion than a sentence under the right heading.
- Do I have to rewrite the legal wording?
- No, and you probably should not. Keep the wording your advisers gave you and add the structure around it: outcome headings, exceptions moved next to their rules, and the three operational lines written plainly. The legal text stays authoritative and the surrounding text is what makes it findable.
Keep reading
- The question this document answersWhat the visitor is really asking, and where an answer becomes a handover.
- Writing a cancellation policy an assistant can quote accuratelyNotice periods are relative to something the passage does not carry. How to write a cancellation policy that survives being read in pieces.
- How to structure warranty terms for a retrieval assistantThree warranties get conflated by customers. How to separate them, state the void conditions, and write what parts and labour excludes.
- How to write a booking policy an assistant can answer guests fromMost booking policies are written for staff. Here is how to restructure one so the answers a guest actually needs are present in the text.
- Every kind of source materialWhat to feed an assistant, and the surgery each document needs first.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.