What is IRI?

What is IRI? It’s the industry standard designed to automate, streamline and remove costs from the returns process. Since its inception, BIC in collaboration with a wide range of member organisations, has worked tirelessly to further develop and promote IRI.

The emphasis is on ensuring that both current implementers and potential adopters of IRI have a robust commercial, operational and technical overview of automated returns management.

The latest review of this best-in-class industry standard in early 2025 has included updates to some of the best practice documentation and the publication of one new document. This review ensures the standard’s continued relevance to returns stakeholders.

Updated Documentation

The Role of Sales and Returns History includes clarifications, diagrams and worked examples to illustrate how the authorisation and rejection processes work.

The Glossary now includes new and revised terms, supported with examples.

Response Codes is now available as a separate document, as well as being incorporated in the Process Specification. The updated list of codes includes deprecations, amendments and new codes. These are designed to remove duplication and ambiguity. Additional guidance is provided where required.  

FAQs now includes a question about new titles and publication dates.

New Documentation

The Value of IRI describes the importance of IRI to retailers, publishers and distributors.

The full set of IRI documents now comprises:

There is a consolidated version, including all of the above coming soon.

For further information, please email: info@bic.org.uk.