Overview
Return Policy information lives in several places within Partners Online. It can be difficult to track down, sometimes difficult to understand, and sometimes tricky to know which policy is actually in play.
If you have more general questions about what return policies are or where to find them in Partners Online, check out our other article that answers those questions.
We wanted to simplify finding policies and understanding them. To do that, we've included them on our Settings page for quick reference.
Below, we'll show you how to see the return policies, tell you which ones we're showing, and explain some of the terms (like financial vs. physical disposition).
Return Policies
Target stores their return policies in a couple of flavors:
Department Level
Item Level
Generally, you should expect your item-level policies to roll up under and consistently match their respective department-level policies.
You can also have multiple policies per department. Items within a department can also have multiple policies. When there are multiple policies per item, we reference the policy marked as primary from the LaunchPad app within Partners Online.
Of note, Target Vendor Income contracts can override return policies.
Department Level Return Policies
To see your return policies in the app, click the settings icon in the upper right-hand of your app.
Step 1: Click the Settings icon next to your vendor name.
Step 2: In Settings, click the Return Policies page.
Let's look at some example return policies and define the columns.
Policy Name: This is a three-letter code starting at AAA and progressing forward. Most suppliers have only a few, and some may have more than 40. So you could see AAM, AAZ, ABA, ABB, ABC, ABE, etc.
Financial Disposition: This field tells you who should pay for returns. Markdown means that Target should handle the cost of the returns. Charge to Vendor implies that the vendor is responsible for the cost of the returns. Target will issue deductions for returns on items with Charge to Vendor as the financial disposition.
Physical Disposition: This field tells you what Target is supposed to do with the actual product when it is returned either at a store or shipped back from a customer. When the disposition is Return to Vendor, there will likely be additional handling and shipping charges as part of deductions for returns.
Dept: This tells you the Target merchandising department number to which the policy is related. If there is only one policy per department, all items within that department will use that policy. Multiple rows of departments mean that different items within the department might not all share the same policy.
Status: This tells you whether the policy is currently available for use. Other values could be Pending or Un-authorized.
Item Level Return Policies
Items within a department can have different policies. To see these, click on any department-level row.
You should see two tables: the upper showing the department policy, and the lower showing all the items that roll up under that department policy.
As mentioned above, when an item has multiple policies listed within Partners Online (either in Target's Item Maintenance app or LaunchPad app), we only show the primary policy listed in LaunchPad.