Merchants talk about return rates. The more useful number is return cost per unit. The rate tells you how often something goes wrong. The cost tells you what it is actually worth fixing.
Here is what a typical processed return costs, broken into its components.
Outbound shipping (already spent)
This cost is sunk before the return begins. The item shipped, the carrier was paid, the label was created. For most ecommerce orders, outbound shipping runs between €4 and €12 depending on carrier, weight, and destination. You do not recover this when a return comes in.
Return shipping
If the merchant offers free returns, and most do because conversion data shows it matters, the reverse logistics cost is on the merchant. This typically runs €4 to €10 for standard parcels in Europe, more for bulky or high-value items. In the United States the range is similar in dollars.
Processing and restocking
When the item arrives back at the warehouse, someone has to inspect it, decide whether it can be resold as new or needs to go to a secondary channel, repackage it if necessary, and restock it. Industry estimates for this labor and handling cost run from €3 to €8 per item. Items that cannot be restocked as new either go to a discount channel at reduced margin or are written off entirely.
Customer service
Every return generates at least one customer service touchpoint, and often more. An initial request, a status question, a follow-up on the refund. At a loaded cost of €5 to €15 per ticket depending on team structure and tooling, this adds real cost to every case.
The refund itself
This is the most visible cost, but not always the largest. The merchant returns the item value and usually the original shipping cost as well. Payment processing fees are typically not refunded.
Add it up
For a €40 order that is returned, a realistic all-in cost looks like this: outbound shipping (€7, sunk), return shipping (€6), processing (€5), customer service (€8), and the refund (€40 plus €7 shipping). That is roughly €73 out for a €40 order. The item may come back in resellable condition and recover some of that, but frequently it does not.
This is why merchants who focus only on the return rate are measuring the wrong thing. A 15% return rate on low-value items with high processing costs is a worse business problem than a 20% return rate on high-value items that restock cleanly.
Where the leverage is
Not all returns are the same case. The cost stack above applies in full when the item ships back. But there is a category of returns, preference-based ones, where the customer changed their mind, found the sizing off, or decided the item was not quite what they expected, where the item is fine, the customer is not upset, and the only reason the return is happening is that nobody offered an alternative before the process started.
This is the category KeepCard works in. Not defects, not wrong items, not damaged goods, those go through the normal return path because they should. The preference-based return is the case where a small incentive offered before the RMA opens can change the outcome entirely.
The economics of the keep offer
The economics are straightforward. If avoiding a single processed return saves €25 to €40 in logistics and handling costs, then a keep offer of €2 to €5 in discount value has a very high return on cost. The merchant keeps the revenue, avoids the cost stack, and the customer gets a small next-order incentive.
The timing problem
The reason this category of return gets processed anyway, despite the math being obvious, is timing. By the time a merchant's support team sees a return request, the customer has already decided. The return portal has already been opened. The RMA may already exist.
KeepCard adds a decision point before any of that. The customer enters before the portal, not after. The reason is captured before the expensive logistics sequence starts. That is the only window in which the outcome can still change, and it is a short one.
The cost stack does not change. The moment you intercept it does.