The box lands on a Tuesday. You pull the top over your shoulders and something is off — the sleeves swallow your hands, or the colour reads warmer in your hallway than it did on a phone screen at midnight. Fine, that happens. What catches people out isn’t the sizing though, it’s the paperwork, because a return at Essentials Canada hangs on a short code you have to ask for before you post anything back.
That code is a Return Authorization number. RA, for short. Send a parcel back without one and it gets turned away at the receiving end, which means your tracksuit does a round trip on your dime and shows up in your hallway two weeks later, still too big.
Thirty days, counted from when you paid
The window runs 30 days from the purchase itself. Sit with that for a second, because it isn’t 30 days from the day the box arrived. Orders take a business day or three to leave the warehouse, and then a standard delivery inside your own province adds another three to seven — so a slow start can quietly eat ten days of your window before you’ve even tried the thing on.
Which makes the advice boring. Try it on the day it lands, rather than leaving the bag propped by the door for two weeks while you think it over.
The step almost everyone skips
So you ask for the RA number before anything else, the store issues it, and that code is what tells their receiving desk your parcel is expected. No code, no acceptance. It isn’t personal either — it’s basically how a shop stops unannounced boxes from stacking up in a corner with nothing to match them to.
I mean, from their side it’s sensible. From yours it’s one extra message between the decision and the post office, and it costs you five minutes.
What to put in the request
Keep it short. Your order number, which item, and what’s actually wrong — too long in the leg, wrong shade of grey, a zip that catches. If a Blue Essentials Tracksuit turned up when you ordered the Green one, say exactly that, because a mix-up on their end gets handled under different rules than a change of heart on yours.
If you post it anyway
It just comes back. Refused parcels don’t get quietly opened and sorted out later, they get returned to sender, and you’ll have paid for one leg of that journey and possibly both. Meanwhile the 30 days keep ticking while the box sits on a truck between Calgary and wherever it was headed. Honestly, this is the most expensive mistake in the whole process, and one email avoids it.
Unworn, tags on, bag intact
Condition is the other place returns quietly fall apart, and the bar is roughly that whatever you post back should look like it never really left the bag — nothing worn in, nothing through a wash cycle, no damage, and the packaging plus every label and tag still with it. That last bit is what gets people, since plenty of us snip a tag off before trying a top on, which, fair enough, feels harmless at the time.
A tracksuit is fussier here than a tee, because there are two halves and both of them have to be in that condition. If you’ve already worn the pants for a grocery run on a damp 0 °C morning, you’re keeping the pants. The top alone won’t put the set back together.
| Step | What happens | Don’t forget |
| 1 | Check your purchase date | The 30 days run from the order, not the delivery |
| 2 | Request the RA number | Order number, the item, and the real reason |
| 3 | Repack both halves | Tags and labels on, original bag included |
| 4 | Ship it back | Canada Post, FedEx or Purolator — keep the tracking slip |
| 5 | Watch your statement | 5–10 business days once the return is approved |
Postage, and who ends up covering it
The split is simple enough. Returning something because it didn’t suit you — wrong size, wrong colour, second thoughts — and the postage home is yours. Across the Essentials Tracksuit range, where sets currently sit somewhere between C$140 and C$180 after the markdowns, a courier label from one side of the country to the other can be a real slice of what you paid. So it’s worth knowing which side of that line you’re standing on before you book anything.
If the item came through defective, or they shipped the wrong one, that cost moves to them. And the shipping you paid at checkout in the first place doesn’t come back either — refunds cover the item, not the trip out. Small detail. It still surprises people who expect the whole amount to reappear on the card.
On the money itself — once a return clears, it comes back to whatever you paid with, somewhere in the five to ten business day range, and then your bank stretches that a bit further with its own processing. So a refund approved on a Thursday can look like nothing happened at all until the middle of the next week. Depends on the card, really.
| Pro Tip: Before you seal the bag, get a photo of both halves with the tags showing — phone on the floor, two seconds — and then hang on to that tracking number, because if a parcel goes wandering somewhere between your post office and theirs, that receipt is pretty much all you’ve got. |
Damaged, faulty or just plain the wrong item
Now, if what turned up is damaged or simply isn’t what you ordered, you get seven days to say so, which is a much tighter leash than the 30 days you have for changing your mind, so don’t sit on it over a weekend. Flag it inside that week and the return cost stops being yours — the store picks that one up.
Which is why you open the box the day it lands, even when you’re busy — run the zip, and have a proper look at whether both labels match what you actually ordered, because an Essentials Jet Black Tracksuit and an Essentials Black Tracksuit are two separate lines on an invoice and that argument goes a lot better on day two than on day twelve.
And a seam that gives up after a month of wear is a different conversation than one that turned up already open — which is the sort of thing a photo settles in about ten seconds.
None of this is complicated. It’s sequenced, and the sequence is what matters: date, code, repack, post. Sort the RA number out before you touch the tape and a tracksuit return turns into a quiet week of waiting instead of a box bouncing back across two provinces.
