We’ve been asked frequently by our customers, how do we manage returns and pickups during the global lockdown? With consumers increasingly not being able to leave their homes due to government policy, scheduling pickups has become increasingly popular.
Some retailers have chosen to extend their return periods and have asked us to extend the validity of return labels. Here is a guide to some of the popular carrier’s expiration policy:
- FedEx - return labels expire after 2 years
- UPS - return labels do not have a specified expiry date
- USPS - return labels expire after 1 year
- DHL - return labels last a minimum of 3 months
- Royal Mail - there is no expiry on return labels from Royal Mail
- Australia Post - return labels expire after 60 days
- Singapore Post - return labels expire after 180 days
We thought it would be useful to write a step-by-step guide showing how to set up auto-scheduling of pickups for FedEx and UPS. If you have requests for other carriers please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.
There are two options when it comes to pickups:
1. Bundled service offering
Such as UPS Return Service 1-Attempt and UPS Return Service 3-Attempts. These allow you to generate labels and schedule the pickup in a single transaction. You can enable these via the wizard:
..but also using our process builder method to set the CAS values such as below:
| Service Description | CAS Value |
| Return Service 1 Attempt | 3 |
| Return Service 3 Attempts | 5 |
2. Schedule pickups from residential addresses
You might have a different flow that requires you to book shipments separately from the shipment booking. We’ve had several requests from consignment retailers that like to trigger the schedule of a pickup when a case updates.
Below are the step-by-step instructions on how to schedule an automated pickup of an existing shipment related to a case: