* Out of twelve returned trackers, one of them went to landfill. The article focuses on that item and does not itemise the fate of the others.
* Adding a tracking device to a returned new product is tantamount to damage. If such a device is detected during returns processing, anyone with half a brain should immediately presume a malicious actor and have the item very carefully and securely assessed for disposal.
* Did not verify that the tracking device remained within the bag.
* "30-40 percent of online purchases are returned" what absolute hoopsla. I've worked in online commerce and this is off by an order of magnitude. A very few segments (e.g. shoes) may approach such return rates.
This crap is why journalism is in such disrepute.
But Amazon also refused to state what fraction of items go to landfill, despite making subjective claims that it's "on occasion" and the "vast majority" are liquidated or resold. If that was true, Amazon would have the data to back it up and would only benefit them to say so.
If we want to know the actual number of items that go to landfill, we don't need to send GPS trackers everywhere, we can just mandate Amazon (and all other companies) to report on that. It's not like they don't have the data.
NB: don't assume that there's no downside to any given retailer unilaterally disclosing their return rates, because returns are a measurable factor in marginal cost & revenue assessment and partially describe both the elasticity of demand and overall customer sentiment. Every retailer of scale would be interested in obtaining the return statistics (especially segmented) of their competitors; and, as the tone of the article illustrates, there are any number of hacks poised to scribble out mendacious venom on the basis of such data, so no corporate PR lackey worth their communications degree will willingly start that conversation.
Absolutely.
> and would only benefit them to say so.
Not nearly as obvious. It might have some PR benefits (this week, until later when public opinion shifts), but it also provides information about their business that they may prefer to not share (off the top of my head, it probably leaks something about defect rates and their quality controls).
Recently I had received a dented cooktop and since it was functional and my family isn't too much interested in aesthetics, Amazon offered 30% refund to keep it.
I think I am doing my part to prevent these products from ending up in landfill.
Amazon also honours refund and return request, but not all time I request it.
It's still better than offline shop experience where I've to deal with a real person making weird faces which I find hard to interpret.
I expect Amazon likely outsources a lot of returns handling, so they may not have that data.
> "30-40 percent of online purchases are returned" what absolute hoopsla. I've worked in online commerce and this is off by an order of magnitude. A very few segments (e.g. shoes) may approach such return rates.
In the online retail world, a 30-40% return rate is common for apparel (clothes), shoes and accessory purchases. Certain categories, such as occasion (wedding, party, etc) could be significantly higher than 40%.
Source: I was an executive at a Nordstrom subsidiary for many years.
I've seen a lot of people on HN complain after receiving counterfeit items or "new" goods that were obviously someone else's returns. I wonder what the Venn diagram would look like of those individuals and the ones who are outraged now.
Amazon is welcome to sell these returns instead of throwing them away that’s not the issue. The problem was that they sell something as new when it’s been opened and used. I think no one would have an issue with it if the returned items were sold as such for a discount.
And this is from the Canadian Broadcasting Company - Canada's gov't funded TV/radio/print news service, not some fly by night organization focused on spitting out content to maximize ad impressions.
Doesn't give you much hope for quality reporting if they can't get it right.
CBC is definitely a mixed bag. Marketplace is amongst their worst.
That seems almost an order of magnitude higher than I’d expect. Setting aside kids shoes (which probably do get 50% returned), I can’t imagine sending back even 5% of my online purchases, let alone 30-40%.
I think I’ve sent back exactly 1 Amazon order in the last year, out of nearly 100.
In 2020 I've returned ~5%:
markers that were dry
test clips with mislabeled quantity
de-laminated screen protector sheet
mislabeled thermal printer (photo, listing said it had an internal spool compartment but it didn't)
cell-phone arm stand that lacked the spring tension, even adjusted to maximum, to hold up my small, un-cased Google Pixel
* Showerhead that came without box, and clearly used. It still had a lot of water inside!
* Underwear from a brand that sells items inside a sealed bag and discards returns came used, without bag (yuck!)
* A module of Samsung RAM had visible wear signs and didn't work
* Cycling glasses came without box and several missing items
The underwear thing upset me so much I emailed Jeff Bezos. After lots of emails forwarded around, nothing happened.
It's sad because they used to be good. But the number of returned and counterfeit items sold as new is mindboggling.
Last year I bought two Levis jeans at the same time. One the exact same model, color and size as the one I was wearing which was worn out, the other a different color (figured I could use having two pairs of jeans). None fit me correctly. The model I had already was too big, the other too small. Sent both of them back and made the effort to go to a brick and mortar store where I could try them. Turns out the sizes had changed or something. I ended up with a different cut, as the model I had was either too tight on the legs or too wide at the waist...
That and the anti-pattern of using Amazon as a quasi-tool-rental outlet where they buy something for a project, use it, and then return it after the project is done. The 'borrowing' aspect was also an issue at Fry's in the Bay Area where test equipment that they sold would have been used already.
Of the two I think the 'borrowing' pattern to be pretty unscrupulous. I see the buy a bunch and return the ones you won't use/wear/eat what ever is more along the lines of the store fitting room approach.
Now, IMO, ordering clothes (and shoes, or anything you're supposed to wear and where fit is important - at least important for a substantial demographic) through online shopping just doesn't seem to make as much sense as other things.
I personally rarely buy online unless I'm talking about staples like shirt and tees that I've tried from certain brands and know how it fits (so don't need returning).
As with other things... this huge shift to online ordering may make from efficiency perspective only when you ignore externalities and subsidies.
I hope we go back to shopping malls for clothing and fitted purchases.
I always felt bad about returns, but my SO worked retail in school and assured me this is how it's designed to be and how every big shopper does it.
And I don't blame returners. There used to be a website that listed variance in sizes from major clothing brands and fashion lines, and it can be huge. If I like a cut of jeans or slacks, I have to try on several, and they without fail will not fit the same.
It's simply not possible to be sure about a shoe size sight unseen. Even within the same brand of shoe, fit varies. I have to assume a very high returns rate is totally expected by online shoe retailers (and for that matter offline ones).
Anything over 2% returns to me generally indicates to me that something is wrong with the product or the product description is not clear enough.
In fact having a 30-40% return rate with a high enough volume will get a buyer banned from Amazon.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers...
Basically, the industry needs some standards to help with all this waste.
In shops, you can try them on. Online, I think it's unavoidable that people try them on at home and send more than half of their clothes purchases back.
Standardisation in the clothing business seems incredibly unlikely. And even when the size is technically correct, it can still be too uncomfortable. You just never know until you try it on.
If you want a truly universal sizing standard that will always guarantee correct sizes, it's going to have to be a lot more detailed than just one or two numbers. It would be a data dump nobody can remember. It might be interesting to have an online service that would remember such detailed sizing info for you and could produce clothes on demand with perfect fit.
They futz with sizing because it's a part of their marketing. Fashion targeting older/ fatter people will have smaller sizing to flatter the customers.
I think buying clothes that don't fit just because you want to say it's a particular size is far more a part of female culture (in my social circles in the UK): womens' clothes are in "sizes", men's clothes are in measurements (inches/cms).
I don't think the industry, nor many of the customers for female fashion want accurate measurement-based sizing.
Neither do men's attire. Even sizes that are meant to be standard (like the British/Italian/EU systems for shirt, jacket and pants sizing) aren't.
I don't buy anything from sellers that don't explicitly give the dimensions in centimetres anymore (which has become standard practice).
Considering the inbound shipping costs to the fulfillment center, the storage and handling costs, hard cost of the finished good, the cost of returning the item from Amazon to the merchant if it is deemed to no longer be "New" (or the choice by the merchant to destroy) plus Amazon's commission of 15-20% depending on the item category, a 30-40% return rate would make one's business unviable at best and bankrupt at worst.
Amazon's retail business has poor profitability.
A trend I observed here among college students is buying clothes for a party or instagram selfie and then returning it.
Small sellers get screwed pretty hard. You should check their forums.
I can't even begin to comprehend how desperate they must be to look good and fit in.
Ok, yeah, so buying something and finding a creative way to hide the tag so you can wear it to a single event and then return it is common enough that it's a decades-old TV/movie trope, but... buying something just to take a selfie for Instagram and then return it? What has the world come to...
I for one have the unfortunate problem that my clothing size is somewhere between M and L. Whenever I buy from a new manufacturer, I basically have to flip a coin if I pick the right one. So for some clothing products, I would definitely hit 50%.
I have the same problem with my 200cm and slim posture. I have a handful of brands I can order blindly, but jeans in particular are a chore to get the right fit. I strongly prefer brick and mortar shops, but size availability varies.
People used to think that returned goods would just be freshened up and sold again — just like clothing you try on in a brick and mortar store — but the reality of the system is slowly getting understood thanks to investigative journalism worldwide.
A Dutch television program in this category concluded that returned clothes that are in good condition are often bound for for markets in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where there is a demand for brand goods below or at the price of lower quality Chinese imports. Some brands don't want this because of brand dilution and fear of their products hitting the black market, so those items are simply destroyed instead.
Suggested solutions include charging a fee for returns, but that will have to be mandatory because people will just shop where the returns are free if left optional.
Personally I would like to see high street shops offer the option of trying on clothing ordered online at their shop for free (or others even if a good business model can be found), and have them handle the returns instead of this grossly unsustainable system we have now. By eliminating the risk of people abusing the system, the need to remove those items from the chain is diminished significantly; just like regular clothes shopping, but with the benefit of a much larger catalogue.
"""
Try before you buy. Exclusively for Prime Members.
1. Choose up to 8 items.
2. Only pay for what you keep.
3. Free and easy returns.
"""
People who pay for Prime do it specifically because it facilitates the way they shop. They buy a lot of stuff, figure out what they want, like, and need, and send the rest back.
It's completely normal, expected behavior in retail apparently.
Particularly in clothing.
From what I understand it is a relatively common practice to order 2-3 of a given item in different sizes, and to return the ones that don't fit.
And this is just the "honest returners", not even going into the whole "order this fancy clothing, wear it to a party, and then return it" "dishonest returners"
Part of this is because people will buy several sizes of the same item and return the ones that don't fit. The other part is people wearing it once then returning it.
The reasons I return items is usually false advertising. I used to spend hours reading reviews and product specs before buying. But now I don't have time to sift through reviews. And of course, fake reviews make it harder.
So all I got is maker's ads and if ads are lying then I don't feel guilty returning an item.
It seems most people have an attitude that if a buyer got duped with false advertisements then it is buyer's fault.
For the year 2020 (so far):
Amazon Orders: 231
Returns: 38
Return Percent: 16.45
Based on Gmail search:
amazon "your refund" after:2020/01/01 before:2021/01/01
For the year 2019:
Amazon Orders: 32
Returns: 11
Return Percent: 34.3
Based on Gmail search:
amazon "your refund" after:2019/01/01 before:2020/01/01
A couple of things to note, 2019 I was mostly buying and returning bras, shorts and shirts that my wife was trying on, because Target and other stores stopped carrying some of her favorites. Some of these clothing purchases actually spilled into early 2020.
2020 I am returning things a lot less because it's a lot of Pantry orders.
Compared to me: I have placed 197 Amazon orders since 2013, and have had 13 returns so far.
I have bought hundreds of items on Amazon and never had to send back any. I bought thousands, of different types, on other services and I only ever had to send back two and that due to the fact the seller sent a wrong item.
I always do at least a very quick research regarding the seller and the item so that probably helps.
But the 30% I can understand is due to people who never intend to buy the product or buy a bunch of them to send some back.
I can sort of understand it in some of the categories (for example clothes) but I also see a lot of people proclaiming how smart they are because they surf on the wave of products they never pay for.
I do think that anything they cannot process properly should be handed off to charity groups who would get items in exchange for helping sort it all out. Then again, having seen my local St Vincents and Goodwill they to suffer overflow but at least with Amazon returns the items would be newer
I used prime for about a year, had probably a 50% return rate and ended up cancelling. Their items are so low quality it's not worth the effort.
And there are the Samyang/Rokinon camera lenses as well -- you need to usually buy 3-4, test them out and keep the sharpest copy. Quality control issues on the manufacturer's side but it's a good deal if you're willing to deal with it.
Some sellers just suck at packaging. There are numerous products that are too easy to damage just by opening the packaging -- I received one item completely wrapped in 8 layers of bubble wrap followed by an entire coating of packing tape over 100% of it. It was nearly impossible to cut open without cutting into wires because you really don't know where the wires are under all that packaging.
Seems like exactly the sort of competitive strategy I’d expect from the “off-price” stores (TJ Maxx in the US, Winner’s in Canada, etc.).
It's way scarier the stuff they send directly to landfill. I know someone that works in chemical waste disposal and they had a deal with Walmart to take care of it all (I'm pretty sure they still do). She was taking back some pretty nice stuff that could easily be sold pretty easily.
People buying returned stuff in bulk and seeing what happens, kinda similar to people buying rented warehouses when the lease expires.
They are still super useful to find those hard to get parts that would typically be impossible to find locally or at least very expensive. Like a carburetor for a chainsaw or a part for an appliance, bearings for a hood fan motor, monitor arm, etc.
A lot of retailers have picked up their game when it comes to online shopping. Places like rockauto.com for auto parts are super competitive and offer a massive inventory (what a great acquisition it would be for AMZN to break into the auto parts sector). Newegg/MicroCenter for PC parts, Costco, etc.
But over all I can't remember the last time I had to return anything and my experience over the last 20 years has been a positive one.
I went out on a date with a program manager for one of Amazon’s return programs and she told me her job was basically finding out ways to repurpose returns as cheaply as possible. Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and least resource consuming way to deal with returns.
In a similar note, search for Amazon Warehouse. That’s one of their programs for returned merchandise and sometimes I have found insane deals there. But you gotta check often.
Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon. There is a massive environmental cost to the practice - it's just externalized. If the companies involved (amazon, the manufacturer) had to bare the full environmental cost, the calculation would often come out different.
I suspect that cost is a much better approximation of resource consumption than what feels wasteful, especially because it forces you to factor human time as a resource, which many environmental activists like to treat as infinite and free.
The environmental impact is big! I hope this is being considered in their Climate Pledge.
The big bottleneck in Amazon's process is probably, among others, how inefficient it would be to restock individual items in the warehouse.
Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.
Why can't returned goods be resold as "open box" or "scratch and dent" products with missing or damaged packaging for a significant discount? Surely making some money is better than paying to dispose of it - not to mention the terrible optics when you get caught.
Most likely because a person has to carefully inspect and repackage it (expensive and the volume is large) and it's a separate inventory category that has to be managed and have separate storage space allocated for it (another expense) and, on top of all that, it doesn't bring in as much money as a new item. And if there was some problem or damage that wasn't caught by the inspection, it's yet another return.
The difficulty of managing customer returned items is common to all retailers and has been known for a while, e.g.:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/growing-online-sales-means-m...
https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/26/news/retail-returns-landfil...
They used to routinely ask the customer to destroy and dump the items, which was certainly less marginally costly. (If it encouraged more abuse, that cost is borne by other business units)
Can't do that with e.g. counterfeits though, or with products that may be dangerous.
And not everything is resellable in practice. To resell something you need to 1. determine what you have (not just the product but also the state it is in), 2. have someone who wants it, 3. that person needs to be willing to accept the risk of getting a used/substandard product (higher risk of it arriving broken), 4. you have to find that person, 5. you have to get the product to that person, 6. you have to manage the whole overhead of the process (additional shipping, sorting, testing, ...).
Each of these steps is associated with costs, both financial and environmental (the latter will skyrocket as soon as you start e.g. attributing some of the environmental footprint of the people whose labor you spend on these tasks to those tasks).
It's very unlikely that Amazon wouldn't optimize something so obvious.
Once the returns are generated, there's probably not much of a better way to deal with it. However, if you ban returns, online shopping becomes less attractive - people will use retail stores again. Which also toss stuff that doesn't sell, use a lot more real estate, air conditioning, and again, human labor. There's a reason online is often cheaper, and it may well be "cheaper" (better) for the environment too, despite the waste.
If we're going to fix something, it really aught to be food waste!
The amount of food that gets disposed of daily - while millions go hungry - is humanities greatest issue - not unwanted coveralls.
This is one of those situations where saying "this problem isn't important, look at X," isn't the best strategy. We have to solve _waste_ in general. Different types will have different solutions.
It's all about directing (our extremely limited) focus on issues with a higher priority. Food insecurity (even in North America) is a significantly bigger problem than Amazon returns.
there are also several issue with how the return may go. amazon may tell you to just keep the item (if the cost of shipping + processing the return is higher that the actual product price / margin on the item). they may decide that the item is in not good condition when it comes back. the packaging may be missing parts or damaged. i would guess that a lot of items don’t make it through the process.
also i would guess that because Amazon keeps existing and making a profit they have this baked into their business model. Also I would be shocked if the return rate is 30-40%. Again guessing, I would say it’s probably 1-2%. A lot of people buy shit they don’t need and keep it.
As far as “hacking the system” I think that they should have a system in place to track how many things you return (and if they were in good condition/could be resold) and how much money they made on your purchases. If overall you’re a net negative I would not be surprised if your account got suspended/banned. Why would they do business with you if you’re a bad actor?
I also wonder how much is handled by weight. Weight of returned product != expected weight of product -> something is off and it's probably not worth figuring out.
We threw items in the bin from a distance, so they were definitely unsellable. I'm sure that lots of merchandise that would have been functional/sellable ended up being thrown out.
I am disappointed by CBC making a click bait Amazon story, when it is actually the story of retail that our unconscious civilization ignores. CBC does mention this later in the article.
What the hell? I rarely return either, but find myself returning online merchandise even less often than brick and mortar simply because of the inconvenience of managing packing and shipping.
How are people returning 30-40% of everything they purchase online?
The important part of this article is the critique of the powerful monopolistic corporate player, Amazon:
"[Amazon] did write the playbook on free returns, says Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and advertising agency.
The tactic of enticing customers to buy more than they need and return what they don't want "has had tragic repercussions for the environment and business," he says."
It seems to me like the HN community sometimes nitpicks over tiny details and fails to take part in the larger systemic critiques. Are there others who are also frustrated by the lack of larger, systemic critiques?
So the seller ends up having to take the loss?
With these returned items, the seller just loses money and has a lower income than if they could resell them.
Their tax goes down because of returns, but that's just normal income tax because their income goes down.
If they didn't donate the goods, just threw them away, they would pay exactly the same tax. So there is no tax benefit gained from donating.
Would love to stop subsidizing the indecisive, the scammers, the people who can't bother to research products before they buy, etc.
First problem: When do you credit the refund?
If you credit it right away, what happens if the customer subsequently loses the item? Even assuming you can simply rebill them, you've still pissed off the new purchaser who was expecting that item to be available.
If you don't issue the refund until the new buyer confirms receipt (which aligns some incentives of your returner) then what happens if it takes months to sell? Defer too long and you've pissed off the old customer and effectively reneged on your return policy (not to mention forced them to store your item without compensation).
Next problem: How do you apportion blame if old customer says they sent it in good condition and new customer says it arrived damaged? You have no way of knowing who's right. Do you just write it off?
My gut says you'll run into more issues as you flesh this out. e.g. The "speediness" of your brand will tarnish when customers drag their heels to ship things out (sorry, I'm on vacation, will have to wait until i get back). Human nature will tempt people to "borrow" the item while they're holding onto it for you. If you thought inventory control was hard with a bunch of warehouses fully under your control, imagine what it'll be like after you crowdsource it out to a bunch of consumers.
Amazon already let's you just keep low-value items that cost more to ship back than they're worth. The upside of your idea to Amazon seems small, and I see so much opportunity for abuse.
If you think you can solve the challenges, maybe you can launch a decentralized inventory startup. Would be worth a ton if you do manage to get it to work.
Amazon is very customer-centric company. Given the huge pain this kind of system could cause for customers is my guess why they haven't rolled-out any attempts at a solution to the general public.
It's a fascinating problem to me. I've been buying/selling on eBay for 10 years. I also sell on Facebook marketplace for hard-to-ship items. I've learned that if you buy and sell used, you can essentially rent certain things for very cheap, which is a problem set and solution that has a lot in common with amazon's product return problem.
Giving money--even indirectly--to poor people makes economic sense because they'll spend it on goods and services that keep other people employed.
Punishing the poor out of some moral imperative is economically destructive.
The reporting seems oblivious to the cost of humans making resell/reuse/repair/recycle/disposal decisions at this scale.
It's a perfect animal farm!
It got a fix in about 3 minutes, indoors, on a workbench, under 2 shelves of equipment and parts, in a part of a building with a double roof.
And that was the 5th generation chipset. We're on the 9th now, and they're much, much, much more sensitive.
All the habits and assumptions I learned with my 2002-era Garmin eTrex no longer apply.
The assumptions underlying the criticism of Amazon's and FedEx's strategy is that landfill costs and/or transportation costs do not represent the true cost to society.
If they try to repair an irreparable hard drive but throw perfectly good items like a bag they're quite dysfunctional.
And their inability to send all the ordered items in ONE package is irritating too.
What is this article about exactly?
* The privacy of consumers who might eventually buy some of the stuff stuffed with their trackers.
* The scene at 1:49 where it appears they put a tracker in a plastic bag inside something like a coffee kettle.
* Sticking a tracker to a kid's toy.
What the hell is wrong with these people? I get they wanted to do a great investigation, but this seems so wrong to me...
I don't share your concern here. CBC is a reputable org. They can just turn off the trackers if the items appear to be getting re-sold to an end-consumer. Even then, I don't think it would be a privacy violation for a journalist to go and talk to them and say "hey did you know this was a returned item?" etc.
If the kids toy made it into the hands of a kid without that tracker being noticed, I'd have deeper concerns. I.e. what's stopping someone from putting razorblades or some toxic checmical in a kids toy and returning it? Someone needs to check over returned items for basic quality, and should DEFINITELY notice the massive tracker.
Also, note they were expecting most or all of them to end up in landfills, them finding homes is an ideal outcome, but maybe not expected.
It also says something about the quality of returned merchandise and inspection of it: Amazon didn't find and remove the tracking devices, the products "looked fine" and were sent on their way. Perhaps that's one reason Amazon prefers to just toss stuff.
If the items were sensitive in some way (bondage equipment, say, or doctored home security equipment) then certainly.
That's disingenuous. I've never purchased "more than I need" from Amazon. But probably about 10% of items purchased for the first time simply aren't as advertised -- not Amazon's fault, but the manufacturer's. They don't meet the needs you bought them for, so you have no choice but to return them. And of course clothing is notorious, because manufacturers still insist on making up their own idiosyncratic definitions of S/M/L, when simply providing measurements in inches or centimeters would fix most problems. (Also color-accurate photography, for when the item listed and photographed as red turns out to be orange-pink.)
> "You're lucky if half of all returns can still be sold as new, so a huge amount of merchandise has to be dispositioned via some other means — liquidation, refurbishment, recycling, or landfill."
Yup, that's just how it works. That's why I buy a lot of stuff "open box" off eBay -- especially things like dongles, adapters, cheap peripherals. They all come from returns from places like Amazon and Best Buy, but are half the price. It's great.
This article isn't surprising, except for one data point about a single bag that wasn't resold. But they're probably hiring minimum-wage workers to categorize returns, who make errors.
There isn't really anything new in this article.
> That's disingenuous. I've never purchased "more than I need" from Amazon
It's a stretch to extrapolate from your singular experience to accuse the author of acting in bad faith.
Its called vanity sizing. Basically people buy more clothes if they don't feel like they are buying fat/anorexic size clothes.
My guess is you've never purchased clothes then. Regardless, this is your own individual experience and doesn't represent the trend as a whole.