Manage Amazon Returns with IFTTT

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It can be a pain to manage your amazon account.  You have to stay on top of feedback, returns, pricing, and inventory aging to name a few.  I’ve experimented with a couple services to help manage returns, but they were either cost-prohibitive or terrible.  Eventually I stumbled upon the idea to use IFTTT to manage Amazon returns.

For those of you not familiar with it, IFTTT stands for “If That Than This” and is a service that allows you to link up other services.  There are several pre-made formulas such as “Tell Alexa to find your phone”, “Automatically unmute your android phone when you get home”, and “Save photos you’re tagged in on Facebook to dropbox”.

IFTTT also allows you to create your own simple apps by selecting a “trigger” and then setting a desired task to be created.  To help manage our Amazon returns, I’m going to show you how to add an entry to a google drive spreadsheet every time you get a new return.

Create New Applet

Our first step will be to create a new applet.  In the upper-right corner of the web page, you’ll find a dropdown menu item named “create” which will take you to the above screen.  Next, we want to click on “this” to select what we want our trigger to be.

If Gmail

Search for “gmail” in the search box.

Then choose “New email in inbox”.

Lastly enter do-not-reply@amazon.com into the emai address box and click ‘create trigger’.

Then Drive

Next, click on “that”.

Then choose “drive”.

Next, click ‘add a row to spreadsheet’.

And then, enter in the necessary information. Spreadsheet name and drive folder path determine where the spreadsheet is saved at.  In the screenshot below you would find this under “IFFT/Gmail/Returns” in your google drive account.

The formatted row section autopopulates with more information that you need.  I keep it simple and just leave ReceivedAt and Subject.  The “Received At” date is helpful to determine if it’s past the time the user should have returned it, and the subject contains the order number.

Manage Amazon Returns

Now that you have this applet set up, any returns you get will be added to a spreadsheet.  When they come in by default the date is set such as “February 11, 2017 at 03:07PM” and the Subject is “Refund initiated for order 141-0146723-1016205”.  I like to trip those down and changes the dates to something such as “2-11-2017” and “141-0146723-1016205”.

Once a week, I go through my spreadsheet and I go into seller central and I check to see if the returns have been sent back to me.  If they were returned and added back to my inventory, I give them a green background.  In the event that there were some issues, I give them a red background.  Lastly, if the customer has not returned the item within 45 days, I give it a yellow background and submit a ticket to amazon.

I also add a separate column for “Returned?” and “Disposition” to keep track of what exactly happened with the order.

Hopefully this helps you keep track of your returns.  The best part about this is it’s free and doesn’t take a whole lot of time to set up and manage.