Product Returns

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Melissa Campanelli and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published on Total Retail titled, “Bracing for the Returns Avalanche,” authored by Andrew Hogenson of Infosys Consulting. Hogenson discusses the influx of product returns that retailers are currently dealing with following the 2020 holiday season, especially considering…

The retail industry is on the tipping point of a catastrophic returns tsunami following this holiday season. With the fast-growing e-commerce market and steady consumer migration to digital shopping platforms over the last few years, returns have been quite unsurprisingly on the rise. In 2019, retailers were overwhelmed with a staggering $41 billion value of…

Walmart has launched a service that enables customers to schedule a return for a product bought online, in-store or from a third-party vendor. The new free service, called Carrier Pickup by FedEx, allows customers to initiate their return process on Walmart's website or app, schedule a date for pickup, and print a label. Then it will…

A couple years ago retailers set a series of events in motion that inadvertently created one of the industry’s biggest challenges: how to manage the exponential rise in product returns while also meeting customers' high expectations. As it stands, artificial intelligence (AI) may be the only solution. How it Happened It all started with pure…

E-commerce returns have been a black hole for retailers.  It has been challenging to understand the complete impact of product returns, as the process has typically been manual and reliant on paper-based systems. With no real insight into the overall effect of returns, they've been considered a necessary but unfortunate cost and therefore sidelined in…

Overall, e-commerce sales rose an incredible 16 percent in 2019, capping off an excellent upward trend throughout the past decade. While the COVID-19 pandemic has only boosted this growth, certain industries have taken a tumble despite the overall increase in online traffic. With so many of us wearing sweatpants and T-shirts every day, the fashion…

Between November 2019 and January 2020, shoppers across the U.S. bought a record amount of goods, about $1.1 trillion, approximately 5 percent more than in 2018 over the same period, according to Deloitte. This is good news for the fashion and beauty industry at large, however, there’s a growing problem in retail that may reach…

Thanks to the convenience, speed and overall ease of the modern day e-commerce landscape, product returns have become synonymous with the purchasing process. Consumers are able to buy multiple colors, sizes and variations of a certain product with the comfort of knowing they can take the ones they don't want back to the retailer with…

With countrywide COVID-19 guidelines in place, online retail has grown faster than expected. Data from North American retailers shows that online purchasing was up an average of 56 percent over the same period in 2019. Some have even seen a 300 percent increase during the pandemic. The sharp rise in online shopping is bound to lead…

Few retailers would argue with the notion that for years customers have held retailers to high (and increasing) expectations. Now it appears from a recent survey that a small, but significant, percentage of consumers are willing to take retail justice into their own hands when things don’t go their way. A worrisome percentage of consumers…