You tightened your return window last month, from 60 days to 30. You updated the setting in Tracksies. The customer-facing returns policy on your site updated at the same moment, because it reads from that setting instead of being a separately-maintained page. When a customer lands on it today, they see the correct window. You didn’t have to remember.
That’s the idea: one source of truth for your returns policy, displayed wherever it needs to appear, always current.
What the generated policy shows
Pulled live from your returns settings:
- Return window (“30 days from receipt” or “30 days from purchase”, depending on what you configured).
- Ship-back deadline (how long the customer has to post the items after the return is approved).
- Restocking fee if you’ve set one (percentage or flat amount, whichever you chose).
- Accepted return reasons you’ve listed.
- Return address you’ve configured.
- Return instructions (free-text).
- General policy text (free-text for anything the structured fields don’t cover).
Each section only appears when you’ve actually set the thing. Haven’t set a restocking fee? The fee section is omitted. No return address configured? That section stays hidden. The policy shows what applies; nothing more, nothing less.
Where it appears
- The
[tracksies_returns_policy]shortcode: drop it on a page. On a product page, it renders the product-specific version; anywhere else, it renders the global master policy. - Pass
product_id="123"to force a specific product’s policy (useful when embedding it on a landing page for that product). - Product page Returns tab: each product gets a Returns tab added to its WooCommerce product tabs, showing the product-specific policy in context.
- WooCommerce privacy policy: appends to the Privacy Policy helper text Woo surfaces.
- Checkout terms: shows in the checkout terms area. Suppress this via filter if you’d rather not show it at checkout.
A note on what this is and isn’t
This feature publishes the settings you’ve configured inside Tracksies; it doesn’t decide what those settings should be. Returns rules vary by jurisdiction (Australian Consumer Law looks different from UK distance-selling regulations, which look different again from US state-by-state rules), and we can’t tell you what applies where you trade.
What we can tell you: the configurable fields (return window, ship-back deadline, restocking fee, accepted reasons, return address, instructions, general policy text) cover most of what consumer-protection regimes ask returns policies to disclose. The toolset is robust; you should be able to express most jurisdictions’ requirements through what’s there. Talk to a lawyer who works in your jurisdiction about how to fill the fields in for your specific obligations. We’ve built the levers; pulling them correctly for your country is a conversation with someone qualified to advise on it.
If you’re weighing this up against writing it manually or another returns-policy plugin
Writing it manually is what most shops start with: a WordPress page with the policy typed into it. Fine for a simple static policy that doesn’t change much. The moment your settings and policy drift apart (you tightened the window in settings but forgot to update the page), you’ve got a customer-trust problem. The generated policy avoids that by reading the same source the workflow uses.
Returns plugins with their own policy display (WC Return Manager, RMA-style plugins) often bundle a policy area inside their own UI, sometimes as hardcoded template text. HQ reads from the same settings that drive the workflow, so staff process returns against the same rules customers read.
If you’re running one of those plugins and its policy display is working for you, no pressing reason to swap. If you’re running HQ for the workflow anyway, the generated policy comes along for the ride.
Why shops keep it on
Manually-maintained policy pages drift. Every shop has a version of the story where the policy page said one thing and actual practice was another, and a customer noticed. Generated policies take that failure mode off the table. The page shows what the system enforces. You focus on getting the settings right; the document takes care of itself.