Returns became a disaster during the peak season, and sellers lost more than $4.4 billion due to refunds without returns!

Affected by the epidemic, more and more consumers chose to shop online this holiday shopping season. While holiday online sales hit a record high, the number of returns of peak season goods also surged, causing great losses to sellers on e-commerce platforms.

According to data from inventory auction service B-Stock , holiday e-commerce returns are expected to increase by more than 10% over last year , with returns reaching $ 114 billion . UPS expects a record 60 million packages to be returned during the holiday shopping season .

According to foreign media reports, the number of returns for online shopping by consumers is much higher than that for in-store shopping. This trend is more obvious during the holiday shopping season, and the cost of processing e-commerce returns usually exceeds the value of the product itself .

Kim Friddle, who runs new and returns , said Amazon orders typically require only one shipping label to get them from the fulfillment center to the customer's doorstep, but once the goods are returned, it usually takes three shipments to get the goods back to the distribution center again .

During the product return process, many goods need to stay in warehouses or transit centers, and people in the storage center also need to check the items and determine whether they are in a state that can be sold again . Therefore, rising transportation costs are not the only factor that retailers use to calculate return costs . After a series of return processes, labor and storage costs are also very high . Some retailers say that the return costs of these products may be higher than the selling price of the goods.

In order to eliminate some of the hassles of handling returns, some large retailers including Amazon, Target and Walmart have begun to launch some just-keep-it policies . According to AlixPartners data, sellers lost up to $4.4 billion due to the refund-no-return policy during this holiday shopping season !

Currently, these reverse logistics have become a bigger headache in the logistics industry than forward logistics. The Reverse Logistics Association said that retailers are paying close attention to these return transactions and are actively looking for cheaper return solutions .

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