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Expensive to get wrongUnited StatesBeauty & personal care

Return policies are written for readers, not machines

All 29 of these beauty storefronts publish a returns page a person can read, 17 of them state a return window in plain words on it, and 1 state that policy as a field in the product record, with 2 stating a shipping cost the same way.

A shopping surface deciding whether to show your product reads the field and cannot read the page, so a brand with a genuinely better returns policy than its shelf-mates gets no credit for it in the one place a stranger compares options, and the work of writing the policy is already done.

81

81 of a possible 90Tier B, systematic first-party observation. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 90, however good it looks.

Verified September 9, 2026Rechecked every 180 days, next by March 8, 2027.

Structure

Held since August 5, 2026How the market is physically or commercially arranged. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

A repeat run finds more than a quarter of these storefronts stating their return policy as a structured field on the product record.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

  1. Tier Bobserved-webn = 29

    orbt: Market Register commerce collector, run commerce-20260805140548

    Two reads on the same storefront, counted only where both landed: the returns page fetched from the shop’s own policy path, and the schema.org offer on one product page. The comparison is presence against presence, so a shop whose field says something different from its page is counted as having a field either way, and nothing here checks the two agree. Retailers are excluded from both origin groups: OLIVE YOUNG Global, Peach & Lily, Soko Glam, Stylevana. Their catalogues are other companies’ product copy, so counting them by the storefront’s own origin would put Korean listings inside the US-origin group. Run commerce-20260805140548.

    Read 2026-08-05 · CC BY · page hash 9a6ccfd5ea85

History

  1. v1created

    Derived from collector run commerce-20260805053004.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

  • structured-data
  • returns
  • shipping
  • policy
  • shopping
  • machine-readability
  • beauty

Cite this entry

“Return policies are written for readers, not machines”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:us:return-policies-are-written-for-readers-not-for-machines, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/us--return-policies-are-written-for-readers-not-for-machines. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

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Free to quote, cite and act on. Not to resell or redistribute — the sources ask that of us, and each one’s terms are named. Machine-readable: entries.json carries this record under the id omr:us:return-policies-are-written-for-readers-not-for-machines, with the same evidence and falsifier.

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