£1.6bn bill for clothes sent back

THE growing trend for shoppers to order too many clothes online and return those they do not want is forecast to blow a £1.6 billion hole in retailers’ profits by Christmas, research has found.

Items sent back after Black Friday are thought to have added an extra £250million to the fashion industry’s bill in just one day.

Returns cost online firms as much as £5 per item because retailers have to pay the postage, register the returns in their warehouses and prepare them for resale. Some items need to be cleaned or thrown away.

As Christmas approaches, it becomes increasingly difficult to process returned stock before the sales begin in January, and spring season stock starts to arrive.

Specialist logistics firms including Clipper have made the returns process faster and are used by Asos, New Look and Superdry.

But Graham Best, chief executive at ReBound – which helps retailers manage and track returns and which conducted the research – said the problem was ‘still something that’s been neglected by many retailers’.