Many unhappy returns? Online holiday shopping’s big hangover
Kristina Nicolas will proudly tell you she’s been doing practically all her shopping online for years now. She also will tell you, in a more exasperated voice, this has not remotely abbreviated the amount of time she spends going to stores.
“It has become a huge errand and a huge part of my life having to get all this stuff back to where it came from,” said Nicolas, a stay-at-home mother and former fashion buyer. She receives about 10 to 15 boxes per week of merchandise at her home in Chicago, and returns (or tries to return) about 30 percent.
The paradox of e-commerce now is that while acquiring items has gotten easier than ever before, exchanging or returning the unwanted ones remains an epic, tyrannical time suck.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Online shopping would save us time, we were told. It would free us from the torment of malls, angry clerks and wasted Saturdays. But as the fantasy becomes real — e-commerce will account for $2.3 trillion, or one-tenth of all retail sales, in 2017, according to eMarketer — some shoppers are surprised to discover they are devoting as much time to returns as they once did to in-person shopping, with less fun.
“I’ve ended up keeping stuff because the return process was such a pain,” said Rob Cromer, an entrepreneur in New York City, using profanity.
Between Dec. 26 and Jan. 31, 45 percent of Americans will try to return at least one gift, according to Optoro, an e-commerce software company. Today, that gift is more likely than ever to have been purchased online: 2017 is the first year a majority of Americans planned to do their holiday shopping on the web, according to Deloitte.
But while a handful of retailers receive nearly unanimous praise from shoppers for open-ended, friction-free returns of purchases made online (Amazon, Nordstrom, L.L. Bean, Madewell, among others), and many offer more generous policies during the holiday season, plenty still impose tight limitations and draconian requirements that seem designed to either discourage returns or drive traffic into their physical locations.