Use this article to understand what gets configured in Ingrid Care, in what order, and where that configuration lives.
This article is for merchants in phase 2 of an Ingrid Care implementation, and for the operations, customer service, and e-commerce people who will own Ingrid Care afterward. Configuration is phase 2 of your Ingrid Care implementation. Ingrid Care configuration is joint work — you bring the return policy agreed during scoping, Ingrid configures it with you and coaches your team to run it afterward.
This is where most of an Ingrid Care project happens. The Returns Portal, part of Ingrid Care, that your shoppers use, the rules that govern what they can do, and the emails they receive are all configuration rather than code. It all happens in the Returns Back-office.
What gets configured in Ingrid Care
The list below shows what gets configured in Ingrid Care, roughly in the order it makes sense to build.
Returns Portal — what shoppers see and use. This is the surface everything else feeds.
Product policies — return windows and rules, including products treated differently from the rest of your catalog.
Price setups — who pays for a return, and under what conditions. This is where the commercial decision from scoping becomes real behavior.
Return addresses — where returns physically go, per market or warehouse.
Carrier integrations for returns — the carrier products Ingrid Care return shipments book on, activated with your credentials.
Return label generation — how and when the shopper gets their label.
Email templates — what shoppers are told, and when. Worth knowing early: which Ingrid Care emails fire follows from your configuration rather than from individual on-off switches.
Ingrid Care configuration if exchanges are in scope
In Ingrid Care, exchange suggestions shape what shoppers are offered instead of a refund, which is where the commercial upside of exchanges actually comes from.
How your catalog is structured decides whether Ingrid Care exchange suggestions work automatically. For size and color exchanges to be suggested by default, each product needs to exist as a single product with its sizes and colors as variants. Where a catalog creates every size or color as a separate product — which Ingrid sees fairly often — exchange suggestions will not work automatically. Worth checking early, since it is a change on your side rather than in Ingrid Care.
Ingrid Care configuration if your warehouse will work in Ingrid
Configure Ingrid Care Quality check — the inspection workflow warehouse staff use to assess a returned item, record its condition, and trigger a refund, partial refund, or denial.
Ingrid Care language and wording
Ingrid Care text overrides let you change Returns Portal wording to match your brand voice, per language. Worth doing before launch rather than after — this is customer-facing copy.
What you bring to Ingrid Care configuration
Your written return policy from scoping — windows, reasons, who pays, product exceptions
Your brand wording for the Returns Portal and emails, in each language you serve
The people who will own it — for Ingrid Care this usually spans operations and customer service, not just e-commerce
What Ingrid does during Ingrid Care configuration
Configures the Returns Portal, policies, and pricing with you
Activates your return carrier products
Reviews any customization beyond the standard configuration
Coaches your team so they can change policy themselves afterward
Where to configure Ingrid Care
First, the same point that causes confusion on Ingrid Promise: "Ingrid production" means your Ingrid environment, not your live website. Your Ingrid Care configuration lives there from day one, which is not the same as being visible to your shoppers — that happens when the Returns Portal is published to your site at go-live.
Beyond that, Ingrid Care works differently from the other Ingrid products. There is no staging environment for Ingrid Care and no copy function — all Ingrid Care configuration lives in Ingrid's production environment.
There is also no draft and publish step in Ingrid Care. Changes take effect as soon as you make them. During the build that is convenient. After go-live it means a change reaches your shoppers straight away, so it is worth being deliberate once you are live.
If you want an Ingrid Care test setup, it takes the form of an additional shop in the same environment, connected to your test systems rather than your live ones. Worth knowing before you ask for one: moving a setup from one shop to another means rebuilding it by hand. Settings get missed, and Ingrid has seen problems caused by exactly that. So the default is to configure in the shop your shoppers will actually use. Whether a separate test shop is worth the duplication is something you and Ingrid decide together during scoping.
Two Ingrid Care-specific things to keep in mind throughout: return shipments book on your real carrier contracts from any shop, and because a return only completes when money moves, refund verification depends on your live payment setup. Phase 4 covers both.