‘In an omnichannel world, online returns stances looks out of kilter with shopper behaviour’

Consumers are not taking kindly, it seems, to the ticking-offs they’re getting from retailers about their high level of returns. Both PrettyLittleThing and Asos have taken steps to close accounts of their most prolific ‘offenders’.

And who can blame the retailers? Returns are costing the industry a small fortune – £6.6bn per year, in fact, according to Retail Economics.

Another brand to have taken proactive steps towards addressing the issue is Next. It may not have gone as far as closing accounts, but it’s certainly showing shoppers that it’s watching them. A colleague’s wife received an email from the retail giant the other week quoting her percentage of returns, stating it is “concerned as to why the majority of products are unsuitable”.

Next would argue it’s taking a proactive, helpful stance. It offers, for instance, help with size guides.

Recipients, though, don’t always receive such communications in the way they were intended. This particular customer construed the tone as passive aggressive and felt somewhat justifiably chastised.

Retailers wouldn’t go around rolling eyes at customers who take eight items into a fitting room only to hand them all back

There are two problems with retailers taking either drastic measures like Asos or gentler approaches like Next in tackling the problem head on. One is around challenging ingrained shopping habits. The second is around data sophistication.

First, telling your customers they’re returning too much product online is entirely at odds with in-store browsing and buying behaviour. Retailers wouldn’t go around rolling eyes at customers who take eight items into a fitting room only to hand them all back.

Fashion shopping is something of a lottery. Store staff and fitting room attendants might bemoan the added hassle, but that’s a separate issue. Why is it fine for customers to do this in a shop but a no-no online?

The best store sales teams will encourage discovery. They’ll suggest bold new styles or fashion combinations shoppers may never have dreamt of. They’ll load up that fitting room with armfuls of potential purchases. It may not work, in which case the sales assistant will more than likely smile warmly and accept stylistic defeat as well as, perhaps, a loss of commission.

But if it’s a fashion triumph, the newly upsold shopper feels elated, full of warmth towards both the sales assistant and the brand whose clothes have provided them with their dopamine hit.

The challenge for retailers seeking ways to address customers with a high returns rate is whether they are asking the right questions of their data

Are retailers saying, therefore, that if you shop online you must behave completely differently? It’s the equivalent of a sales assistant standing at the door of the changing room holding up a notice: ‘Only take in what you know you’ll like. Please don’t experiment. We don’t want the added cost. And make sure you look at the size guide and get the measuring tape out before you take it off the rail. Also, if you don’t like the fit or quality you should have thought of that before you picked it up. Look closer, next time’.

I exaggerate, of course. What’s more, there are genuinely customers who cheat the system and exploit retailers by wearing clothes and returning them and so on. But the point is, in a supposedly omnichannel world, we can’t expect shoppers to behave in completely different ways.

Secondly, it raises a data issue. If retailers take too simplistic a stance on those they are singling out for high returns, they risk burning bridges with loyal, lucrative customers. I speak from an uninformed perspective on insight, so I revert to one man who definitely does know his data – Michael Ross, chief data scientist at Edited, co-founder at Figleaves and eCommera, and all-round mathematical data genius.

He talks about the issue of customer churn, to which some of the same principles are surely applicable in the world of returns. Ross says: “A prediction model, no matter how accurate, is as good as useless if there’s no connection to potential interventions.” He also points to ignoring the ‘why’; ‘Is it price, service, experience, competition, or something else. Without understanding the root causes, interventions are difficult to design effectively.”

Some of those customers who have had their accounts closed may well have gone on buy more in the future. Yes, some may have high returns rates, but are retailers really layering on insight that enables them to understand the true lifetime value of that customer?

The challenge for retailers seeking ways to address customers with a high returns rate is whether they are asking the right questions of their data. Get it wrong, and they could be waving goodbye to a lot of potential sales.

Our Next shopper, for one, is still feeling bruised. She will, she’s made clear, be taking her online fashion spend to M&S from now on.