AI Return Prediction & Analysis

Installation

1. Install and activate the plugin via the extension manager (Store).
2. Clear the cache (Settings → Caches & Indexes) or run bin/console cache:clear.

Initial Setup

1. Open the Returns Prognosis module in the admin.
2. Settings tab: define the thresholds for the risk score (return rate for yellow and red) and the analysis period.
3. Optionally enable email reports: set the recipient address and schedule (weekly/monthly). Use „Send test report" to verify it immediately.
4. Optional AI classification: disabled by default. First switch on “Enable AI classification”, then choose a provider (Anthropic Claude or OpenAI) and enter your own API key. Please read the Privacy section below first.
5. Click Recalculate to run the first analysis — otherwise the nightly scheduled task handles it automatically.

Daily Use

• Dashboard: overall return rate, time series and forecast at a glance.
• Products: risk score per product, sortable and filterable; detail view with return reasons and history.
• Return reasons: distribution across the seven categories; free-text reasons are categorized automatically when AI is enabled.
• Customers: high-risk customers based on their return history, with a direct jump to the customer profile.
• Product and customer lists can be exported as CSV.

Privacy: optional AI classification

Analysis, risk score, forecasting, reports and exports run entirely inside your shop. There is no cloud dependency unless you enable AI classification.

AI classification is disabled by default. If you enable it, the following applies:

• Data transferred: exclusively the free-text return reason entered by customers, without HTML and truncated to 200 characters
• Not transferred: name, address, email address, phone number, customer, order and invoice numbers, payment data, product and price data
• Recipient: depending on your selection, Anthropic PBC, San Francisco, USA (api.anthropic.com) or OpenAI, San Francisco, USA (api.openai.com)
• Purpose: assigning the free text to one of the seven return reason categories
• Legal basis: to be determined by you as the controller (typically Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR)
• Data processing agreement: you conclude it directly with the provider; the plugin uses your own API key

Free-text fields can contain personal data even when nobody asks for it — truncation and HTML stripping do not change that. Please add this transfer to your privacy notice. Sample wording to adapt:

We use an analytics extension to evaluate our returns. If you state a reason in the free-text field when returning an item, we transfer that text — truncated to 200 characters and without any further details about you, your order or your address — to [Anthropic PBC, San Francisco, USA | OpenAI, San Francisco, USA] in order to assign it to a category automatically. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; our legitimate interest lies in improving our range of products and our product descriptions. A data processing agreement is in place with the provider.

If you prefer not to share any data, simply leave the switch off. Free-text reasons are still stored and shown under “Other” or “Unknown”; every other feature works unchanged.

Notes

• The plugin reads order data only and never writes to Shopware core tables.
• Forecasts become more meaningful as the data base grows — ideally after a few weeks of order/return history.
• Permissions are granted under Settings › Users & permissions › Roles: View and Edit in the permissions matrix (group “Orders”), Export, Customer data and Settings under “Additional permissions”.