Return & Waste Credits

The easiest money to win back from your vendors is the money for product that came back defective, or had to be destroyed. Let's look at return and waste credits.

A customer returns a vape that won't fire. A batch fails testing and has to be thrown out. That's real product cost coming off your shelf — and most of it was never yours to eat. It was your vendor's. This page is where you get it back.

Of the four kinds of credit, these two are the simplest. Customer returns come straight from your point-of-sale, but only the defensible ones: defective, wrong item, a bad batch. Never a customer who just changed their mind. Destroyed product comes from Metrc, counted only when it's logged as waste. Both roll straight onto that vendor's monthly credit memo.

So how much of that cost does the vendor cover? That's set right here — your return policy. It's the vendor's share of what returned or destroyed product cost you. And for most vendors, it's the full hundred percent.

The math is refreshingly simple. Take what the unit cost you — what you actually paid the vendor. Multiply by how many came back or got destroyed. Then multiply by that coverage rate. That's the credit. No guessing, no negotiation — just your own cost data, added up.

And here's why these two matter so much. Returns and waste are the only credits you can claim no matter how you bought the product — on consignment and on wholesale, both. Co-marketing and aging markdowns apply only to wholesale.

Because they're backed by hard data — a return your POS recorded, a destruction Metrc logged — these are the credits vendors almost never argue with. They're the cleanest place to start every month. Backed by data nobody can dispute.