Why Compare Their Prices and Not Their Return Window?

Almost nobody terms-matches, and the buyer is doing both.

Think about the last thing you bought online that cost real money. You compared the price. Then you scrolled down and looked for three numbers: what does shipping cost, how long do I have to return it, and what happens if it breaks.

Those three numbers decide as many purchases as price does, and your competitor can change all three tomorrow without anyone noticing.

So we read them as numbers, not as a checkbox.

There is a distinction here that took us a while to get right. Checking whether a returns policy exists is a legal question, and the answer is yes or no. Reading what is inside it is a commercial question, and the answer is 30, or 14, or 365, and that is the one a buyer compares.

We look in four places, in order, and the order is deliberate.

Policy pages first, because that is where the binding text lives. Homepage last, because a free shipping banner is marketing and can promise something the policy does not.

When both exist, we keep both, because a gap between the banner and the policy is itself the finding. That is a customer service problem waiting to happen for them, and a talking point for you. It is also the kind of thing that appears in one star reviews about six weeks later.

One rule that sounds pedantic and is not: we never guess currency. "Free shipping over 50" with no symbol gets stored as a number with no currency, and the row says so. Assuming dollars because the site is in English would be wrong for every European brand in the dataset, and a confidently wrong currency is worse than an honest blank.

Sitting next to this is the boring compliance sweep: do they have the pages the law actually requires, and which consent platform runs their banner. That is a policy audit, not a legal verdict, and I want to be precise about the difference. We can tell you a page is missing. We cannot tell you whether that makes them liable, and neither can any tool that claims to check four jurisdictions from a webpage.

One thing to do next: open your returns policy and your competitor's, side by side.

Then check whether your own homepage banner still agrees with your own policy. That one catches people.