The pump stopped working

Viscosity outside the pump specification

Pumps have an output and a viscosity range. A product thicker than the pump was designed for doses badly or seizes, and choosing a pump by neck finish alone is how a working formula ends up in a package that cannot deliver it.

Drying at the orifice

Soap left in the nozzle dries between uses, and a product used occasionally rather than daily can be solid at the tip by the time somebody comes back to it. A pump with a cover or a smaller orifice helps, and so does telling people to run it under warm water.

Shipping without a lock

An unlocked pump stacked in a carton gets pressed by the boxes around it, and the product arrives leaked into the packaging. A locking pump or a transit cap is a small cost against a shipment of ruined cartons.

Air locks on first use

Many pumps need several firm presses to prime, and a customer who presses twice and concludes it is broken has had a product failure that never happened. Printing a priming instruction prevents a return.

Check it after the label goes on

A shrink sleeve or a wrap label can stiffen a bottle enough to change how it vents, and a label over the neck can interfere with the closure seating. Testing the finished, labeled unit catches it.

Keep one from each production run

And use it occasionally over the following months. The slow failures, drying and prime loss, only show with time, and a retained unit is the only way to see them before a customer does.

Tell the customer how to recover it

Several firm presses to reprime, or warm water over the nozzle to clear dried product. One line on the label turns a return into a thirty-second fix, and it costs nothing to print.

References