My wife does an enormous amount of shopping for clothing online for her and our daughters. But part of the reason she does so much of it is that about 80% of what she buys is returned, after which she goes back to shopping for more. (Most common reason for returns is that the stuff doesn’t fit properly, but also the colors can look different than onscreen, and sometimes on actual inspection the stuff looks cheaply made.)
She doesn’t buy anything without free shipping and rarely buys clothing without free return shipping, so I doubt if the sellers are profiting off her purchases on average, especially since most of what she buys is deeply discounted to begin with.
But she might be an outlier. I’m wondering if there’s any data on what percentage of overall online clothing purchases are returned. Also, to what extent this differs between sellers who pay return shipping versus those who don’t.
A lot of consumers probably think the returns end up back on the shelf, but that’s often not the case. Merchants hesitate to resell returned items since they can’t be sure of the condition. I’m not sure specifically about clothing, but online retailers have return rates from 25-40%. Much of it will end up being sent to liquidators or the landfill rather than put back on the shelf. If the liquidators can’t sell it, it often ends up being donated to charity or in the landfill. This documentary bought items from Amazon and returned them with hidden GPS trackers to see where they ended up. Some of the clothing items got sent straight to the landfill.
Of course, where you shop online matters too… There are plenty of memes/videos about what was ordered versus what arrived, especially from sites like Wish.
I imagine it probably varies with the market region and the category (e.g. basic vs fashion), but as a data point, I once worked briefly with a startup company that burned rapidly through its quite sizeable investor capital and got itself into deep trouble, owing in significant part to a return rate of somewhere between 30% and 40% of orders.
This was a company that specialised in reshipping famous brand items (so their margin was already slim on that basis) to market regions where the official channel declined to ship for an assortment of reasons, but one of those reasons was that the prevailing mail order convention in these regions was cash on delivery and if you changed your mind between purchase and delivery, you could just decline to pay/accept the delivery, and the item would be automatically returned at the vendor’s cost.
The returned items were warehoused in the hope that they could be matched against other orders in the near future, but in practice, this didn’t happen, and the company ran a very chaotic and space/cost-inefficient warehouse that filled up with assorted single items which would eventually be bulk sold at a fraction of cost.
The company is still operating, so I will not name them, but they were supposed to be migrating to the 3PL where I worked, but that migration collapsed when it became apparent they had no money, and that was most of the reason for leaving their previous 3PL.
In summary, 40% returns is probably something that some vendors can swallow, if they have a decent margin, either because they are the brand they’re selling, or because their market is simple.
OMG, that’s fucking horrible! I subscribe to Stitch Fix, which is a service that sends you boxes of clothes. You try them on, keep what you want, and return the rest. For me, this means I pay them a $50 yearly fee, they send me clothes and most of the time I send all of them back. I always wondered what happens next. Guess I better ask them!
I order a lot of my clothes, especially pants, from L. L. Bean and could count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to send anything back, but have never encountered any problems doing so.
I could definitely see any of the other things happening with the “disposable” clothing offered by many online AND B&M outlets.
People returning obviously-used “new” clothing has always been a huge issue.
I also order lots of clothes and rarely return anything unless they ship the wrong item. I usually order from companies where I know my size and how it fits, or alternatively, something so cheap it’s not worth bothering to send back if it doesn’t fit - I bought sundresses for $15 on line a couple of years ago - if the first one hadn’t fit, I just would have donated it .
While the OP’s wife probably isn’t an complete outlier , there are also probably enough people like us to drop the average below 80%.
Well, I went to the Stitch Fix site and they have a whole page about sustainability. As far as returned clothing goes, they have only this to say:
However, when we do have excess inventory, we have partnerships in place to direct products to alternate channels rather than directly to a waste stream.
So that’s…something. However, I’m going to cancel my subscription, just to be on the safe side.
I ordered a pair of Eastland shoes online, in size 10 1/2, and found out upon trying them on that I had bumped up to size 11. (That’s women’s, BTW.) I did send them back, but they were no longer new and I bet they were sold the same way. They had a crease that just wasn’t there before I tried them on.
The impression I get is that companies hate product returns, because they eat into profits. Something like ten or fifteen years ago, I ordered a new computer for my brother for Christmas. He, being the world’s most stubborn person, declined the gift. So I called them to arrange a return. (Keep in mind that the box was never opened so the thing was as good as new.) They asked, If we gave you a ten-percent discount, would you keep it? What if we gave you a twenty-percent discount? That wasn’t enough to convince my brother so it went back. Presumably it got sold through Dell’s outlet store, at a big discount.
Well, Zappo’s used to encourage ordering several pairs, trying them all on and returning the ones you don’t like or don’t fit. It helped that they have free shipping and free returns. I don’t know how often their customers take it to that extreme, though.
This was in 2008, 2009, so their policies have surely changed since then. But the UPS truck was dedicated almost solely to bringing those shoes, there were so many of them.