Returns are usually owned by operations, measured as a cost per unit, and attacked with process improvement: faster inspection, better routing, cheaper labels.
All useful. None of it addresses why the item came back.
Returns are feedback
Every return is a customer telling you something specific, and most retailers throw the message away and keep the parcel.
The categories are well known — wrong size, not as described, changed my mind, faulty, ordered multiples — and they point at completely different causes. Wrong size is a sizing-data problem. Not as described is a photography or copy problem. Ordered multiples is a deliberate behaviour your sizing uncertainty caused. Faulty is a supplier problem.
Aggregated into one rate, they cancel each other out and suggest nothing.
The reason nobody acts on it
The return reason is captured, usually. It is captured in the returns portal, which belongs to operations, and it does not travel back to the product record, which belongs to trading.
So the buyer who could change the size guide never sees that this line comes back at three times the category average, and always for the same reason. The information exists and is stored somewhere it cannot be acted on — a pattern that shows up everywhere, not only in retail.
What to connect
Modest work, mostly plumbing:
- Return reason attached to the product, not just the order. Rate and reason visible wherever a buyer looks at a line.
- Reason by variant, because “runs small” is usually one size, not the range.
- Time-to-return. Same day suggests the page misled them; three weeks suggests they never really wanted it.
- Return rate visible before reorder, at the point the decision is made.
The interventions are cheap
Once the signal reaches the right person, the fixes are unglamorous and effective: a corrected size guide, an extra photograph showing scale, a measurement in the copy, a supplier conversation, or delisting a line whose margin never survives its return rate.
That last one is worth dwelling on. Some products are unprofitable only after returns, and are stocked because the return cost sits in a different budget from the margin. Nobody is doing anything wrong; the numbers simply never meet.
Where to start
One report: return rate and top reason, by product, for the last quarter, ordered by volume. Put it in front of the buying team.
The first three lines on that list will usually justify the entire piece of work.
If your returns data lives somewhere your buyers cannot see it, get in touch, or read more about our retail work.