Online shopping’s unhappy returns
Kristina Nicolas will proudly tell you that she’s been doing practically all her shopping online for years now. She will also tell you, in a more exasperated voice, that 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 ease of the task varies. “Sometimes it can be returned to the store, but sometimes it cannot,” said Nicolas, growing louder. “Sometimes it’s UPS or DHL or FedEx or however they shipped it, then you have to print up a label, and I never seem to have the right tape.”
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, 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.
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.
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.
One can also feel sorry for the stores. Returns cost retailers $260 billion in 2015, according to the National Retail Federation. And about 30 percent of items bought online end up being returned, versus 9 percent of items bought in stores.
Retailers can ease the expense if they can convince customers to return webpurchased items to stores in person. Returns to stores cost companies half as much as returns to distribution centers, and allow retailers to get the items back on shelves faster, according to new research from AlixPartners, a consulting firm. And driving shoppers into stores has the added benefit of possibly resulting in more purchases and 62 percent of consumers prefer in-store returns.
Some third-party vendors are eager to cash in on the inconvenience of returns. In 2015, two former Nordstrom employees started Happy Returns, a company that operates physical “return bars” in malls where customers can give back items brought from e-commerce retailers for immediate refunds. Happy Returns has 50 locations and expects to open 150 more by the end of 2018.