Buying online easier than returning items

It’s estimated that as much as 30% of purchases returned.

CHICAGO — Holiday shoppers who enjoyed the convenience of fulfilling wish lists with a simple click of the “buy” button are learning this week that the return process for online purchases can still be a hassle.

E-commerce purchases can be made with little effort, but shoppers say the returns are almost never as straightforward.

Lauren O’Connor would rather not have made the trip to a post office Tuesday morning. But she needed to return a dog bed and coat she bought online at Lands’ End for her new puppy. Lands’ End doesn’t have a store near her home, so carting her online purchase back to a bricks-and-mortar location, as some shoppers do, wasn’t an option.

That’s how she found herself waiting with an unwieldy square cardboard box while struggling to find a pen to address the package, all without forfeiting her place in a growing line. “It’s just a big hassle,” she said. Dealing with returns is a pain for retailers too, and one that’s only getting bigger, said Chris Zubel, a managing director at real estate services firm CBRE.

Online sales are growing, and shoppers are more likely to return i t e ms bought over t he i nt e rnet, Zubel said. That’s because on-screen images don’t always match what the item looks like in person, and consumers buy- ing apparel often order the same item in multiple sizes or colors, intending to send all but one version back.

Estimates of the return rate for online purchases range from 15 percent to 30 percent, depending on the type of item purchased and who you ask, compared with 8 percent for all U.S. merchandise sales, according to a 2015 report from the National Retail Federation and software company The Retail Equation. The problem is worse over the holidays.

Unit e d Parcel S e r v i c e s e e s a bump in shipping volumes throughout the month of January as customers return unwanted gifts, order items in exchange and spend gift cards, said spokesman Matthew O’Connor. But the first week of January is UPS’ busiest period for e-commerce returns, tracked using the pre-printed shipping labels some retailers provide to make returns easier for customers.

The early-January flurry of activity is good news for shipping companies such as UPS, which expects to ship about 5.8 million returns during the first week in January 2017, up from about 5 million the year before, O’Connor said. It’s not such great news for the customers making extra trips to ship return packages, or retailers that have to figure out what to do with extra merchandise that comes back.

A UPS survey found 70 percent of online shoppers made an extra purchase when returning an item to a brick-and-mortar store, according to O’Connor. Only about 45 percent made an additional purchase when processing a return online and then shipping it back.