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Increased customer returns rates to impact online shopping negatively

Monday 4 May 2015 11:19 CET | News

The escalating level of customer returns could undermine the success of the online shopping market, and the home delivery services which support it, according to an official from the courier firm Fastlane.

David Jinks, Fastlane International’s Head of Public Relations, has said that e-tailers are currently facing return rates as high as 60%, whereas 5% or 6% is the norm for traditional brick and mortar retailers, postandparcel.info reports. He has also said that the return rate is surpassing that of the overall growth in ecommerce, presently, fact which is costing retailers GBP 20 billion a year in the UK alone and, for example, returned consumer electronics in US is worth USD 17 billion.

Jinks has also claimed that it is not customers to be blamed for this situation, but the retailers, as some of them are short-sighted and looking for easy sales. For example, misleading descriptions which make an item sound something which is not, lead to increased returns. Similarly, pictures that make an item look larger or better finished are also highly likely to result in returned items because shoppers grow less tolerant, and ever-more likely to return items that don’t exactly match their expectations.

Jinks suggested that a more widespread adoption of the click-and-collect model, whereby a customer can buy or order goods from a store’s website and collect them from a local branch, may be one way of helping to overcome the high-returns problem as well as fast items delivery.


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Keywords: customer, returns rate, increase, negative, impact, online shopping, merchant, online sales, ecommerce, parcel, delivery
Categories: Payments & Commerce
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Countries: World
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Payments & Commerce