The twentysomething daughter of a friend of mine recently ordered half a dozen new dresses. She wasn’t planning to keep the lot; she’d been invited to the wedding of a college classmate and knew in advance that she was going to send back all but the one she liked best. “Swimsuits and dresses for weddings—you never buy just one,” Joanie Demer, a co-founder of the Krazy Coupon Lady, a shopping-strategy Web site, told me. For some online apparel retailers, returns now average forty per cent of sales.
Steady growth in Internet shopping has been accompanied by steady growth in returns of all kinds. A forest’s worth of artificial Christmas trees goes back every January. Bags of green plastic Easter grass go back every spring. Returns of large-screen TVs surge immediately following the Super Bowl. People who buy portable generators during weather emergencies use them until the emergencies have ended, and then those go back, too. A friend of mine returned so many digital books to Audible that the company now makes her call or e-mail if she wants to return another. People who’ve been invited to fancy parties sometimes buy expensive outfits or accessories, then return them the next day, caviar stains and all—a practice known as “wardrobing.” Brick-and-mortar shoppers also return purchases. “Petco takes back dead fish,” Demer said. “Home Depot and Lowe’s let you return dead plants, for a year. You just have to be shameless enough to stand in line with the thing you killed.” It almost goes without saying that Americans are the world’s leading refund seekers; consumers in Japan seldom return anything.
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I think it’s pretty telling that prices are high enough that this is still profitable. If companies want to overcharge and try to buy customers with insane policies then I hope people exploit these companies to the fullest.
The problem is only those that take advantage of it benefit. Everyone else pays more to cover that cost. However, with worsening quality standards, good return policies are helpful. It is more hassle to return online goods, by virtue of requiring shipping. So, they need to make it as frictionless as possible. Logistics is where Amazon is winning. As logistics improves generally, especially with aut aged delivery, hopefully it breaks their monopoly like practices. Unfortunately, it may go the other way with proprietary automated shipping. So, similar to Amazon, only the big guys get good rates. Everyone else pays to play or doesn’t play.
Yeah, I’m not buying a whole lot from a place that doesn’t have a super generous return policy, because I just don’t trust the quality without it.
I won’t use it unless I actually need to, but I consider not having a very good return policy a huge red flag telling me they’re selling trash.