It seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies.
It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.
I knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody.
Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.
The GP described it as abuse. That's not evidence of companies calling it abuse. As you say, this is basically intrinsic to the deal of buying clothes/shoes/etc online and obviously online retailers know that and accept it, or else they would not allow it (and in turn would not exist as businesses).
Well we don't know that they're talking about clothes at all. Clothing retailers are still pretty open about returns afaik because it's kind of the only way to run an online clothes store people will actually use.
I think that depends a lot on the industry. There's a lot of evidence Amazon is recycling "unopened" returns into the new stock pool because people are getting sealed items with their contents replaced because it turns out it's not that hard to shrink wrap items well enough to convince an overworked return intake employee.
Some also gets diverted into return resale stores where companies like Amazon will sell a 3rd party a pallet of miscellaneous returns they then sell.
The few cases where this is an advertised arrangement should be excluded from the usual situation where returns are meant for defects/errors.
Even then, the one clothes example (shoes - which had been returned stained and with socks in the box) mentioned in the above still wouldn't seem like a valid return by any stretch.
Zalando has free return for 30 days in my country, and they also include returning goods from multiple orders in a single return package as a suggestion in their FAQ.
They sell clothes and also shoes.
Zalando very much is operating on the principle that you order things to try them out at home and return whatever doesn’t fit or whatever you end up not liking. Just like in a physical store you try out clothes and shoes inside the store to see how it fits and how it looks on you.
That being said, there are limits to what they consider reasonable:
> One key part of that experience, and something our customers deeply value, is the ability to make an order, try the items at home, and, if needed, easily return those they don’t want to keep. In short: bringing the fitting room to your home.
> […]
> Customers whose return activity reaches disproportionately high levels will receive an email warning. This proactive step gives them the opportunity to reflect on their behavior, discover the solutions we provide to avoid returns, and adjust before further measures are taken.
I've edited the above to clarify the issue in GP's shoes example was meant to be about the previous return being stained with socks in the box, not just that it was shoes in general.
Due to having extremely wide feet, in shoes that don't specifically have a wide option, my shoes can be anywhere from an 8.5 to a 10, depending on the manufacturer and style.
> Due to having extremely wide feet, in shoes that don't specifically have a wide option, my shoes can be anywhere from an 8.5 to a 10, depending on the manufacturer and style.
As someone with wide feet, I don’t buy shoes unless they specifically have width options. It’s not particularly easy to do unless you really like traditional men’s leather shoes and boots, but there are some athletic shoe makers that offer wide width shoes (NB and Hoka for sure).
Even given all of the above, I still own shoes in 3-4 different sizes because shoe sizes are not standardized between makers, like you said.
I've edited the above to clarify the issue in GP's shoes example was meant to be about the previous return being stained with socks in the box, not just that it was shoes in general.
It's even worse than that, because they are adamant that they aren't abusing the system, and insist that if they didn't want people doing it, they would stop taking returns.
I wonder if they were similarly blasé when companies started implementing policies to actually stop them?
That kind of argument only works where stopping the behavior is cost free, the main reason most places didn't do it before was because the number of people doing it was low so the cost of actually tracking returns rigorously outweighed the benefit of low friction returns for the 99+% of customer who weren't abusing the system. When more people start creating large numbers of returns suddenly the amount of losses they create become enough to care about stopping. (Or it becomes a low hanging fruit to squeeze more profit out of an existing business, spending customer preference/loyality for profit by cutting a small waste center)
The behavior described in the immediately above comment (ordering multiples and returning ones you don't like) is not abuse. The behavior described above that (lying about a defective item) is abuse.
Dealing with returns is the tradeoff that online sellers make in order not to put a store in every city or to deal with retail arrangements.
> The behavior described in the immediately above comment (ordering multiples and returning ones you don't like) is not abuse.
Oh yes it is. Buying something you know you don't plan to keep is abuse. If you ran a store, would you be fine with 2/3 of your orders being returned? A good litmus test for "am I being an asshole" is "what would the world look like if everyone behaved like me?"
You should do some reading on the birth of ecommerce. This was a very explicit tradeoff that these businesses decided to make. That's why free returns are pervasive.
Now whether it's a good thing wrt the environment etc...
I'm aware of how ecommerce got started. The fact that some businesses did the math to estimate that only a small percentage of customers are assholes, doesn't mean they aren't assholes. With apologies to patio11, "The optimal amount of return abusers is non-zero."
Buying 3 new-in-box $1000 cameras and returning 2 of them covered with your smudgy fingerprints is abuse, no matter how you slice it. If everyone did it, those cameras would cost twice as much. I'm saddened but not surprised people are defending that behavior here.
> Buying 3 new-in-box $1000 cameras and returning 2 of them covered with your smudgy fingerprints is abuse
I agree. What percentage of online returns do you think is similar to this scenario?
What percentage of "buy N and return N-1" return patterns (which you believe to be abusive) is people buying multiple $1,000+ pieces of electronics equipment, versus say 3 sizes of shoes or 3 colors of a dress?
My guess is the former case, which I agree is abusive, is <1% of such return patterns. Partially because it's a legitimately stupid way to shop for those types of items and requires significant credit, while buying multiple sizes/colors of items like clothing is a completely sensible way to shop.
I remember common advice on HN (and indeed from Apple Store employees) when Apple repairs were taking a while was just "buy a new one and return it when you get yours back".
It's also abusive for Amazon to delay your order for a week with their Super Spiteful Shipping, pushing you to sign up for their sunk cost fallacy subscription. When I'm in the middle of some project, I've got no qualms about ordering 2 or 3 different types of some part I need to hedge. I've been burned too many times with ordering only one type, having it have a problem, and then having to wait again. Constant games with prices is another one that induces orders from me that are destined to be returned. When a price drops significantly, the times I've asked customer service about having the price adjusted they tell me to just return and rebuy (hoping I'll be too lazy), so that's what I do. It's abuse all around, I'm not going to put moral weight on my own shoulders while the amoral company has no such burden.
You are mixing up "being an asshole" with "doing abuse". Ordering 10 t-shirts and returning 9 of them could be classified as assholery (subjectively, I'd classify it as that), while it's very likely not abuse, we'd have to check the ToS of a specific seller.
There are companies that cater to these types of people. Their purpose is to allow you to have things shipped to you so that you can pick the ones you like before return the things you do not. They claim to be personal stylists by learning what you like by what you keep and return. It's not abuse, it's how they want it to work
Buying 3 different sizes of a shirt because manufacturers refuse to standardize on sizing information and returning 2/3 of them seems like a standard practice for buying clothes online. Not sure why you think the stores don't account for the returns.
The return policies are indeed meant to be used the way you find problematic. You can buy a computer to use while yours is being repaired. Then return it. Employees will instruct you to do this.
For clothing it makes sense, also much of the price of clothing is often illusory, the marginal cost for the piece of clothing is tremendously less than the price paid.
It's not just an online thing. I know people that do retail therapy knowing full well they intend to return it. I don't have the same experience, so it is befuddling to me. Something totally different than just walking around in a store and looking but not buying.
Places need to get a lot better about actually checking returned items if they're going to go back into the stream as a NIB item instead of open box. Amazon and other electronics places are bad about this with horror stories of getting expensive graphics cards either replaced with equivalent weight items or with the GPU chip harvested in some cases.
It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.