Moosejaw makes tracks for its own returns and order management market

After hearing from customers that they wanted a simplified returns process, Moosejaw Mountaineering and Backcountry Inc. has developed an integrated online order and returns management system popular with shoppers as well as other retailers, CFO Jeffrey Wolfe tells Internet Retailer.

“We decided to do this because we had been getting too much feedback saying ‘you have to make customer returns easier,’” Wolfe says. “Now we’re getting tons of feedback from customers thanking us for caring about them. At the end of the day, it’s all about increasing customer service and sales.”

Moosejaw, which sells outdoor hiking gear through seven Midwest stores, two print catalogs and Moosejaw.com, has taken a two-part approach to meeting customers’ demands for easier returns. On Oct. 29, it went live with a Smart Label returns program from Newgistics Inc. that delivers a pre-printed returns label with each Moosejaw product delivery. Customers can re-pack their item in the original package, attach the return shipping label and drop it in a mailbox. Newgistics picks up the package from the U.S.P.S. within a day and routes it back to the retailer through its own shipping network. Once Newgistics takes control of the package, it scans the Smart Label into a web-based system that triggers an alert to Moosejaw as well as to the customer about the status of the return.

Wolfe has taken the system a step further by integrating the Newgistics system into Moosejaw’s proprietary web-based Etail Manager application, which also connects with Moosejaw’s order management and inventory systems to provide Moosejaw’s managers and customers real-time online visibility into the status of both orders and returns. The Etail Manager integrates with Island Pacific’s Retail Pro suite of store operations software to spread visibility across offline as well as online channels, though it could also be modified to integrate with other platforms, Wolfe says. Etail Manager was designed to provide small retailers the kind of web-based order and returns management tool usually deployed only by larger retailers, he adds.

Wolfe has set up Etail Manager as a separate business from Moosejaw in order to sell it to other small multi-channel retailers, including South Dakota golf equipment merchant Austads and surfing equipment retailer Killer Dana in California.

Etail Manager is offered as a hosted application, with startup costs of about $12,000 and monthly hosting fees starting at $75, Wolfe says.