Commerce isn’t perfect. Not every purchase goes the way the customer wants it to, for one of several reasons. Maybe it’s the wrong size. Maybe they already had the item. Maybe they simply changed their mind. Whatever the cause, returns are a critical part of doing business, albeit one that’s often overlooked in the pursuit of the next hit product. By most people, at least.
Gaurav Saran, Chief Executive Officer of ReverseLogix, is not most people. When he looked at the returns infrastructure in the early 2010s, he found it lacking. Rather than move on from the problem, like so many else had, he kept returning to it, and ReverseLogix was born.
Today, Saran’s clients include DHL, FedEx, Electrolux, and Foxconn, among others. The Microsoft veteran and California State University graduate has successfully built a company that can handle returns operations for companies large, small, and everything in between.
Not that it all happened overnight. As with any company, there are growing pains, as Saran recounted in a 2023 interview. To wit: when you’re dealing with the bigger companies, you’ve got to move at their speed. “Looking back,” he said, “I wish someone had emphasized the importance of patience in dealing with large enterprise clients. The sales cycle can be very long and complex, but the rewards are immense.”
For ReverseLogix, the rewards have continued to pour in, more than 10 years down the line. In January, the company announced a partnership with Canadian freight company Purolator to launch Open Verify, a project to combat returns fraud. That’s a big deal across North America, as the National Retail Federation estimated 13.7% of returns in the U.S. in 2023 were fraudulent, with a price tag of $101 billion.
While Saran grasped this earlier than most, it didn’t take as quickly as he’d hoped. “There were moments when it felt like we were pioneers in a desert rather than a burgeoning industry,” he said. “Those were testing times.” Fortunately for him, those times are over—and there’s no returning.
