Australian returns address for overseas sellers
We give overseas e-commerce sellers a real Australian address for customer returns — received, booked in against your order reference, and reported to you every week.
The return leg is the expensive one. We move it onshore.
The three options
When a customer in Australia wants to return an item bought from overseas, a seller has three ways out of it. Two of them are expensive.
Cost: the full item value
Fast and simple, and you write off the whole sale. Sensible under about $25. Painful on anything above it.
Cost: ~AU$20–30+ per parcel
The item flies home at your expense, often for more than it will resell for, and takes weeks to arrive.
Cost: domestic postage + from AU$3 per item
The customer posts it across town instead of across the world. You get it received, logged and reported the same week.
How it works
We issue you a Sydney PO Box for returns, which you put on your store, your marketplace seller account, or inside your returns platform. Nothing else in your process changes. Your customers see the PO Box — you get the full facility address for your own records.
Each parcel is opened and logged against your order reference, so you know exactly what came back and when. Want more than that — condition grading, photographs, repacking, items sent on somewhere? Tell us what the goods are and what you want done, and we'll quote it.
One weekly file listing everything that arrived, when, and against which order — so you can refund, deny or follow up in a single sitting rather than fielding notifications all week.
For most sellers the item is written off the moment it's returned. Leave it with us and you're done — no storage bill, no freight, nothing to reconcile. If you'd rather have stock back, we can hold it and ship it to you in bulk instead.
Publish a street address for returns and a small number of unhappy customers will look up what else is registered there, find a phone number, and take it out on whoever picks up. We've seen it. So the address your customers get is a Sydney PO Box — deliverable, trackable, and attached to nothing they can drive to or ring. You get the full facility address on engagement; they never do.
What happens to the goods
Most 3PLs charge you to store returns, then charge you again to throw them out. We'd rather take the goods off your hands and deal with them ourselves.
Title passes to us on receipt. What happens next is our problem, our cost and our risk. You get one per-item invoice and the pile is gone.
If we can find a home for an item, you pay nothing to be rid of it. We only charge for disposal where goods are genuinely waste and cost us money to remove.
Want the stock returned? We'll store it at a weekly rate, then pack it and ship it to you as one consolidated movement. Storage, handling and freight are billed to you.
Rate card
No minimum volume, no lock-in contract, no monthly account fee. Send us one parcel a week or two hundred.
| Service | What it covers | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Receive, book in & weekly report | Parcel opened, matched to your order reference, logged and listed in the weekly report. This is the price when you leave the goods with us. | from $3.00 / item |
| Clearing what you leave with us | Title passes to us and we deal with it — nothing further to pay on anything resellable | included |
| Inspection, grading & photographs | Condition graded and photographed against the item record | quoted |
| Repack, relabel or restore | Brought back to sellable condition where possible | quoted |
| Send an item on | Forwarded to a local buyer or an address you nominate | quoted |
| Storage & bulk return to you | Held, then packed and shipped back as one consolidated movement | quoted |
| Disposal of pure waste | Goods with no resale value that cost us to remove | quoted |
What moves the number: size and handling difficulty, and how many you send. Small, easily handled goods arriving in steady volume sit at $3. Bulky, heavy or fragile items take more room and more time, and an account sending a handful a week carries the same overhead as one sending hundreds — both are priced accordingly.
Anything beyond receiving depends entirely on what the goods are and what you want done with them, so we quote it rather than publish a number you'd have to argue with. Tell us the product category and the job, and you'll have a price in two business days.
For context: Australian 3PLs typically charge $3–$8 per returned item for handling alone, before account fees, setup and minimums — then bill you for storage and again for disposal. We start at the bottom of that range and you pay for nothing you haven't asked for. All rates in AUD, GST registered. Invoiced monthly against the item log.
Who you're dealing with
Returns Wharf is the returns operation behind an existing online retailer's Australian business — we already receive, process and clear their customer returns every week. We're now taking on a small number of additional sellers.
Get in touch
Send your product category, rough monthly return volume into Australia, and what you're doing with returns today. We'll come back with a per-item price within two business days.
Email is the way in — we don't publish a phone number or our returns address. You'll have both, and a direct line, as soon as we're working together.
We reply to every enquiry, including the ones we're not the right fit for.