68% of Retailers Now Charge for Returns. Customers Find Out After the Product Has Already Failed Once.
· CX Pulse
68% of retailers now charge return fees, and Trustpilot found returns cut ratings 1.69 stars. The fee arrives after the product has already failed once.
68% of Retailers Now Charge for Returns. Customers Find Out After the Product Has Already Failed Once.
The Wall Street Journal opened its report yesterday with a New Jersey shopper who paid Lane Bryant $7.95 to send back a pair of jeans that didn't fit. The store where she would have tried them on first had closed. That's the whole story in one transaction: the product failed, the fee arrived, and the alternative had already been taken away.
The numbers behind it come from Loop Returns, which tracks transactions for more than 5,000 merchants. 68% of them now charge a return fee at least some of the time. Five years ago it was 43%. The average refund window across larger brands fell from 43 days to 38 over two years. Home Depot moved seasonal decor to a 30-day window and some heating and cooling products to seven days. Macy's and Talbots shortened theirs. Amazon flags products that get returned often and messages high-volume returners, in what a spokeswoman called an educational rather than punitive tone. The Retail Equation, which scores return behavior for retailers, warns 1% to 2% of the shoppers it tracks that a future return may be refused.
The fee doesn't cover the return
Optoro puts the cost of processing a return at about 27% of the purchase price. On a $60 pair of jeans that is roughly $16. A $7.95 fee recovers less than half of it, and no retailer in the Journal's report is charging the full amount. So the fee is priced as a deterrent that looks like cost recovery. Its job is to change behavior, and it is being introduced at the one moment the customer has the least patience for being taught anything.
Where the anger comes from
Trustpilot read more than 4.5 million reviews for a report earlier this year. A review that mentions returns runs 1.69 stars below the average, the steepest drop of any topic in the dataset. The report's own conclusion: no operational factor has a greater effect on U.S. retail trust scores than the returns process. That's the process 68% of retailers just made more expensive.
Taylor Cunningham, a senior director at Trustpilot, told the Journal the sharpest anger comes from a breakdown in transparency rather than from the stricter rules themselves. That tracks with what a return is. Nobody reads a return policy before they buy. Everybody reads it after the product has failed them, and that's the mood the fee arrives in. The same $7.95 on the product page is a term. In the return portal it's a surprise.
At scale
In a large retailer the return policy has at least four owners and no owner of the moment. Finance sets the fee. Operations sets the window. A fraud vendor decides who gets the warning letter. Marketing owns the reviews the whole thing lands in, and reads about the policy the same way the customer does. Three things are worth owning as numbers.
First, the disclosure surface. Is the fee and the window on the product page and at checkout, or on a policy page two clicks away? Count the returns where the customer sees the fee for the first time inside the return portal. That's your surprise rate, and it's the number Cunningham's line is about. Second, the warned 1% to 2%. If a vendor's score can refuse a return, someone on your side needs the authority to override it, and the customer needs a path to that person that isn't a chargeback. Third, refund latency. Trustpilot found delayed refunds and restocking fees drive the strongest dissatisfaction, and fast exchanges for sizing drive the positive reviews. Days from return started to refund issued belongs on the same page as the fee revenue.
Smaller operations
A smaller shop can't afford free returns either, and nobody expects it to. A $7.95 fee and a 38-day window are survivable if they sit above the buy button in one plain sentence. The problem runs the other way from the large retailer's. Their policy lives in five systems. Yours lives in your head, gets applied a little differently to each customer depending on the day, and that's the transparency breakdown in miniature. Write it down, put it at checkout, and make the exchange the easy path, because an exchange keeps the sale and a refund with a fee attached keeps neither.
A return is the customer telling you the product already failed them once. The policy decides whether the second failure is yours. The Journal's report has the retailers and the numbers.