Timon's Confidence in Fresh Food Competitiveness Pays Off...Return Rate Reduced to One-Tenth

Strict Management of Product Quality and Delivery

E-commerce company TMON is achieving notable results in quality competitiveness in the fresh food sector. Confident in their excellent quality, they have offered free returns if customers are dissatisfied, yet the return rate remains significantly lower than that of general products.

According to TMON on the 21st, the return rate of the 'Fresh Free Return' store, which opened at the end of June, was recorded to be one-tenth that of general products over three months. Considering that the return rate for online purchases varies by product category but is generally 10-20%, which is higher than offline purchases, the return rate is managed at below 1%.

TMON's Fresh Free Return store selects and sells only high-quality fresh foods such as fruits, vegetables, meat, and seafood, delivering about 100 types of fresh agricultural, livestock, and marine products for free. The concept of a special section allowing free returns if dissatisfied with quality emphasizes that customers can apply for a return within one day from the date of receipt if they do not like the product. If requested through TMON's customer center, free returns and product collection are supported. This demonstrates confidence in the product quality and price.

Since consumers are sensitive to the quality of fresh foods, the prevailing perception was that they should see and touch the products directly before purchasing. However, as online purchases of various items have become routine and non-face-to-face (untact) consumption has expanded due to the recent spread of COVID-19, fresh food purchases through e-commerce have also greatly increased. In TMON’s case, sales of fresh foods such as fruits, seafood, and meat from September 1 to 16 this year nearly doubled compared to the same period last year. Based on this, the free return strategy to build trust in the sales channel has proven successful.

TMON explained that they applied strict and rigorous standards for store entry to carefully select trustworthy products. They analyzed customer reviews on product quality and delivery from multiple angles and only allowed entry for excellent partner products that received top-level evaluations. To strengthen competitiveness in fresh foods, they chose a 'direct delivery from production site' method. A TMON representative explained, "By directly contracting and delivering with partners such as farms without intermediate distribution processes, we can minimize distribution costs and enhance freshness and price competitiveness."

TMON plans to apply strict standards in operations as well, such as immediately excluding products with quality issues from the Fresh Free Return store. Lee Jin-won, CEO of TMON, said, "As online fresh food purchases increase, customer expectations are also growing. We will continue to expand our production site partners and deliver the reduced intermediate costs to consumers as benefits through our direct delivery policy."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.