It’s not your imagination. Returning online orders is getting harder.
Customers looking for Lane Bryant’s return policy won’t find it on the checkout page when they are paying for their purchases online. Lane Bryant wouldn’t allow a free, direct exchange for another size, either. So she prepaid for a shipping label and drove to a parcel-shipping center to drop it off. “The sharpest anger doesn’t really stem from stricter rules necessarily. Customers can avoid the fee by returning their purchases in a Lane Bryant store. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment. Many retailers have policies like Lane Bryant that allow free returns if the item is dropped off in store, but now charge for returning through the mail. Mail-in returns at Zara, H&M, Uniqlo and T.J. Other sellers state simply that customers are responsible for return shipping costs, which have risen sharply in recent years. Return windows have also gotten shorter. Pumps, portable evaporative coolers and portable heaters must be returned within seven days. Even if an item comes back in good condition, retailers lose money on payment-processing fees and the time and cost it takes to pick and pack the order. But there is a small subset of problematic customers who return things that can’t be resold, including people who visibly wear out clothing before sending it back or shoppers who buy Halloween decor in October and return it, worse for wear, in November. Many retailers now say in their return policies that they reserve the right not to issue a refund when products arrive in poor condition. Other merchants, through third-party vendors that verify refund claims, inform individual consumers that their future return claims may be denied based on their patterns of returns, refund requests and frequency of delivery issues. Some frequent returners justify their behavior by saying the cost of returns is already built into product prices. They believe that their behavior is reasonable if they adhere to the return window and keep the product in good condition. Write to Esther Fung at [email protected]
April Bradley recently bristled at having to pay $7.95 to return a pair of Lane Bryant jeans she had purchased online that didn’t fit. A link at the bottom of the page takes shoppers to the company’s policy, which includes refunding customers who buy online with store credit instead of cash and charging the $7.95 fee for the shipping label. Maxx now incur fees that range from $4.95 to $11.99. In the past two years, refund windows dropped by 5%, from 39 to 37 days, said Loop. Larger brands have shortened windows by 12%, from 43 to 38 days. Macy’s used to accept returns for a full year after purchases, but reduced it to 180 days in 2017, 90 days in 2019 and to 30 days in 2023. Talbots used to offer a return window of 60 days, but reduced it to 30 days in July. That same month, Home Depot said that Halloween and holiday decor must be returned within 30 days. Home Depot said such refunds could take as many as 17 business days to show up in a customer’s account. One vendor, the Retail Equation, said about 1% to 2% of the customers they track get warning messages that future returns may be denied.
Because retailers are inspecting returned items, and in more cases, refunds are taking longer.
The Warren County, N.J., resident said she would have preferred to try them on before purchasing, but a nearby Lane Bryant store had closed a few years ago. It’s coming from a breakdown in transparency,” said Taylor Cunningham, a senior director at Trustpilot. “The ‘I wasn’t told’ reviews indicate that the policy was a surprise or buried, or was misleading. Bradley said the fee should have been clearer at checkout. “This updated policy aligns with industry standards for seasonal items while ensuring we can continue offering a wide selection of high-demand holiday products,” said Home Depot spokesman Tyler Pelfrey. To recoup costs, many are sold to liquidators or they can be resold to consumers as “in good condition” or “not in original packaging. “They’re treating e-commerce sites as rental sites,” said Amrita Bhasin, co-founder and chief executive of Sotira, a returns-software provider. “A tiny fraction of customers who return 10 times more than the typical customer receive informational notifications with advice on how to find the right product and avoid spending time on returns,” said an Amazon spokeswoman. The spokeswoman said it was to educate customers and isn’t meant to be punitive. The company doesn’t close accounts based on return rates, she said. “I do carefully read product descriptions when buying online, but often it’s not possible to tell what a product is like just from descriptions and a few pictures online,” said Liangyu Wang, a student at Georgia Tech who estimates they return around 60% to 80% of the items they buy online.
The items must be unused and with proof of purchase, to receive a full refund. Previously, most of these items could be returned in a 90-day window.
“I was very angry. The company responded with an apology and an $8 credit. Sixty-eight percent of retailers now charge a fee on returns at least some of the time, up from 43% five years ago, according to Loop Returns, an e-commerce returns-and-exchanges platform that tracks transactions for more than 5,000 merchants. Processing a return costs on average 27% of the purchase price, according to Optoro, a returns-management software company. An analysis by online-review platform Trustpilot found that mentions of returns correlate to a drop of roughly 1.6 stars in its 1-to-5 star rating range.
I sent an angry message to them,” said Bradley, who acknowledges that she can sometimes be a difficult customer.
It also has started asking customers for the reason they are making the returns , adding some friction to the return process. And in some cases, frequent returners to Amazon get a message from the company that gives them suggestions on how they can select products they will be more likely to keep.
Amazon.com now flags some product listings for being “frequently returned” or with a badge that says “customers usually keep this.
