App that Facilitates the Return of Merchandise

Case Study: Returns on Demand

Returns On Demand and Melt Studio turned the founders’ app idea for online returns into a functional product to validate and refine for Product-Market Fit.

Projc

THE CHALLENGE

We Needed to Create a Mobile iOS Application First

in 3 months, to be delivered to real customers and receive feedback to be able to iterate the product and find an MMP Minimum Marketable Product.

INITIAL STATE

OUR SOLUTION

The first step in this project was to develop a prototype of the consumer application.

Requirements

Simplification

This technology stack avoids the risk of high-cost development teams and high-speed development, by keeping the requirements in skills simple.

Application

Building

For this, we built an application using React Native/Expo and a simple Firebase backend to create an initial iOS app allowing users to initiate the returns.

Prototype

Release

After the initial prototype release, we created a simple admin system using React, keeping the whole platform in Javascript/Typescript. Over time we have also released the application to Android users.

DELIVER STATE

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

There have been multiple improvements

The first one is a Gmail integration allowing users to import purchases directly from their email. This required an audit from Google to ensure security practices in handling people's data. The audit was performed by a partner of Google in close collaboration with the melt development team and successfully passed.

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We have delivered products for startups from Anchorage to New York.

Lana Ashby Rowder

LookingGlass

April 2, 2026

Thank you so much for this note and for all the work your team put into this project. It truly was such a great experience working together.

We are really happy with how the prototype turned out and especially grateful for the extra backend improvements your team made. Having a more stable and scalable foundation is huge for us as we head into launch, and it did not go unnoticed.

Thank you again for being such a thoughtful and proactive partner throughout this process. We are really excited about what is ahead.

Grateful, Lana

April 2, 2026

Roy Roach

Legacy Link

November 18, 2025

They're showing me the dashboards and they're like, you didn't ask us to do this, but we hope you like it. And I'm watching like, Holy smokes, this is even better than what I thought.

November 18, 2025