It is fair to say that e-commerce has changed the way we buy products for good. Web shops have become the mighty players in the retail landscape, leaving brick-and-mortar in the cold. However multiple challenges are starting to arise for web shops around the world and I’ll be discussing one those challenges today: the return policy.
As you’ll all know shopping online has one big disadvantage: it is impossible to fit that sweater you’ve been wanting for a couple of months now. Only once delivered you’ll be able to find out if it fits. Oftentimes your new sweater was not what you expected after all. You return it. Did you know that over 40% of fashion items bought online are being returned?
Other than that is a big inconvenience for you, it is even more so for a web shop. E-fashion retailers are bleeding money over their return policies and are in desperate need for a more sustainable solution. The solution counter intuitively is: free returns. Research shows that lowering the threshold for returns (by making it free) does not only increase returns, as you would expect, but it also disproportionately increases sales. Did you know that 67% of e-customers check the return page before making a purchase? And did you know that 92% of e-customers would make a purchase at that same store again if the return process was perceived as easy? Many smaller e-fashion retailers don’t dare to introduce free returns and are still hiding away their return policies. Five years ago this could have worked, but in today’s transparent e-commerce market and ever more experienced customers, that just won’t cut it. That’s why just offering free returns is not the entire solution. Web shops should inform their customers as much as possible about how their products look, feel and fit. Secondly, it would save web shops tons if gate keeping (i.e. checking whether the returned product is still sellable) could be done closer to the customer instead of at the distribution centres. There are still a lot of elements in the e-commerce chain for us BIM-students to improve!