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Ecommerce Operations18 of 20

Your returns rate is a commercial problem your reporting is treating as a logistics problem

Chris Wheeler

Your returns rate is a commercial problem your reporting is treating as a logistics problem.

The returns process is managed by operations. The returns data lives in the warehouse management system. The commercial consequence of returns, the margin erosion, the customer lifetime value impact, the acquisition cost of a customer who returned everything they bought, sits in nobody's commercial reporting in a way that connects back to the acquisition channel, the product description, the size guidance, or the photography that set the expectation the returned product failed to meet.

A thirty percent returns rate in fashion ecommerce is industry-standard. It is also, when you trace the return back to its origin, a product representation problem. The customer returned the item because it did not match what the site said it would be. That mismatch was created by a product content process that was optimised for conversion rather than accuracy, and the cost of that optimisation is sitting in the returns line and the logistics budget and the customer satisfaction score while the conversion optimisation programme gets credited with the sale.

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