Returns, Refunds and Exchanges at the Till: Setting Up for the January Rush

Peak trading gets planned. The return of peak trading does not. Somewhere in the first two weeks of January, a meaningful share of what you sold in December comes back through the door, and it arrives as the hardest kind of transaction your counter handles: a customer who is already slightly annoyed, an item whose price and date somebody has to establish, a payment to reverse, and a queue of people behind them who are only there to buy something. Almost none of that needs new hardware. It needs the hardware you already own to be set up for a transaction running backwards, which is a thing most installs were never configured for. Last updated: November 2026. Put a barcode on the receipt. It is the single biggest win. If you change one thing before January, change this. A returns transaction begins with a question: what was this, what did they pay, and when? Answered by eye, it means reading a faded thermal receipt, finding the line, and keying a product code while the customer watches. Answered by barcode, it is one scan and the whole original transaction is on screen: items, prices, discounts, payment method, date. Print a barcode or QR code on every receipt that encodes the transaction reference. Nearly every modern POS can do it and a great many sites have simply never switched it on. The scanner at your counter already reads it. Our receipt printer buyer's guide covers the print side, and if your receipts are coming out faint or fading in a drawer by February, that is a paper and coating problem rather than a printer problem: receipt paper, sizes and coatings explains which stock holds an image and which does not. While you are at it, consider digital receipts for anyone who will give you an email address. A returns conversation that starts with the customer holding up their phone is a returns conversation that is already half done. The gift problem, which is specific to this season December sales create a transaction type that exists at almost no other time of year: the person returning the item did not buy it and does not know what was paid. Two pieces of setup handle most of it. Gift receipts. A receipt that carries the transaction barcode and the item but not the price. The recipient can scan it, you can see exactly what was paid without telling them, and the exchange or credit is correct rather than guessed. It is a receipt template and a button, and it is worth having before mid-December rather than after. A defined no-receipt policy, decided in advance. Lowest recent selling price, credit note only, identification required, whatever you choose. The point is that it is written down and the same for every member of staff, because the alternative is each person at the counter inventing a policy under pressure in front of a queue. Put it on a card at the till. Reversing a payment is not the same as taking one This is where counters stall, and it is worth understanding before January rather than during it. A refund to a card is a separate operation from a sale, it frequently needs the card present or the original transaction reference, and on many terminals it sits behind a supervisor code or a menu that the Saturday staff have never opened. Three things to sort out: Make sure the people on shift can actually process a refund. If it needs a manager code, decide who holds it and make sure that person exists on a Tuesday afternoon in January. If it does not need one, decide whether it should. Know what your terminal requires. Original transaction reference, card present, within a time window. Find out now, from your acquirer, not at the counter. Walk through it with every new starter. A refund is the transaction type that gets least practice and most scrutiny. Then there is the case nobody rehearses: the card system is down and someone wants a refund. The outage playbook is a thing every counter should already have, and ours is in when the card terminal goes down. Add the reverse case to it explicitly, because the answer is almost always a credit note and a callback rather than cash out of the drawer, and that needs to be a policy rather than a judgement call. Cash refunds are the reason a lot of retailers who had nearly abandoned the cash drawer still keep one. If that is a live question for you, do you still need a cash drawer in 2026 goes through it. Getting returned stock back on sale, not into a corner The operational cost of January is not the refund. It is the pile of returned goods behind the counter on the fifteenth that nobody has processed, which is stock you have paid for and cannot sell. The hardware answer is a label printer within reach of the returns point. A returned item frequently needs a new barcode label: the original was on packaging that has gone, or the item is being marked down, or it is going to a different location. If relabelling means walking to the back office, it does not happen, and the goods sit there. A small desktop label printer at the counter is a modest cost against the alternative, and barcode label printers explained covers choosing one. Then decide the disposition at the counter rather than later: back to the shelf, marked down, returned to supplier, or written off. Four buttons. Scanning the item and choosing one of four outcomes while the customer is still standing there is the difference between a clean January and a stocktake in March that does not reconcile, which is a problem stocktake barcode workflows will then have to untangle. A second counter position is worth more than a faster one If your January queue is genuinely half returns, the useful change is not a quicker till. It is separating the two flows. Returns take minutes and buying takes seconds, and putting both through one position means the people buying wait for the people returning. A temporary second position for the first fortnight of January solves it: a tablet, a cordless scanner, a card reader and a mobile receipt printer, which is the same kit a market stall or pop-up…