“We're absolutely fine with customers bringing the items in and returning them to the store,” says Morter. Some retailers have opened up their omnichannel delivery services to operate in reverse, allowing customers the option to return goods in person at the store rather than to print a label and put the package back in the mail.
I'll just take all three and I'll try them on when they get here.’” Still, Morter is concerned that because customers pay nothing for returns, they feel no responsibility for the interaction. Let me help you make sure I can send you the right size,’ and then the response we get is ‘Oh, no, it's fine. There are mixed results, says Morter: “It’s interesting to see the amount of times we've actually reached out to customers and said: ‘Hey, I've seen you've got three of the same dress. Pop-up messages from the customer service team are used to carry the message that Lone Design Club are concerned with sustainable consumption and environmental impact and would prefer to get the order right rather than see excess waste and drive further environmental damage. Lone Design Club’s solution stands somewhere between the point-of-sale intervention of Truefit and the individual relationships that major brands have encouraged with customers. Luxury brands have the capacity to go further, bringing in associates that can form a personal relationship with the customer, offering assurances of the brand’s capacity to find the right fit without over-ordering, says Baird. For multi-brand retailers Truefit claims to have reduced returns from bracketing by 24 per cent, and with single brand retailers this reduction is by as much as 50 per cent. Truefit works with retailers to integrate with their checkout processes and steer customers towards sizes that cross over between brands, using specific labels that the consumer relates to already as a point of reference.
Retailers are investing in intervening pre-purchase to discourage bracketing. Looking for solutionsįor Henry, the first solution is to raise customer awareness so that they act with intention and understand what they are doing when they make a purchase. They'll bin it,” says Lone Design Club’s Morter. “A lot of businesses won't even bother restocking an item.
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Which gives me a heart attack, personally,” says Nikki Baird, a vice president at retail management software company Aptos. “I've seen as many as 50 per cent or 60 per cent of goods are not re-sellable. In worst-case scenarios, returned items can’t be resold. “When you start calculating that, you see why more and more brands say ‘Why don't you keep that item, or destroy it, or show us proof that you donated it, and we’ll provide you a credit because actually processing it back in is very inefficient,” says Henry. However, the cost of handling the return of an item, with labour and storage factored in, comes to 66 per cent of the original price. Every brand the boutique works with also has different rules around receiving returns, complicating logistics.įor retailers working in e-commerce, the cost of delivery is factored into the price of the item, and can account for as much as 10 per cent of the retail price, according to Stord. “A lot of businesses will send returns to a warehouse because the effort and time that goes into unpacking, repacking, checking the item, and then having to put it back to a fulfillment center is a huge amount of hassle,” says Lone Design Club’s Morter. Handling returned goods takes over 20 per cent more space than the same item does on its forward journey, according to Stord. There is a shortage of warehouse space in the US, with less than 4.5 per cent of capacity available, Stord data found, driving an increase in unfilled back-orders. When a fulfillment centre is at capacity, new inventory can’t be brought in. As Henry explains, each line of products requires space at the fulfillment centre for returns, and that space has to be separated across a range of new subcategories for items needing cleaning and repair, and damaged items to be disposed of. Returns impact brands’ capacity to manage their own inventory, and reducing them has become a priority. “One-click checkouts are making it very easy to click before we think about it.” The impact of bracketing “How do you understand the right unit to buy? Can you refer to the websites guidelines, or product photos or find other ways to determine if that is the right unit for you?” He laments current technology for accelerating this trend.
Sean Henry, CEO and founder of Stord, a port-to-porch logistics company, is focused on combating the problem by raising awareness among consumers.
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