Why Does Your E-Commerce Have a High Return Rates?

Antonio Furioso
3 min readFeb 1, 2023

Today, with the increments of online purchases and the most extensive options customers have, return rates became the major challenge for e-commerce businesses. This problem of high return rates can affect the company’s status in several ways. Like losing a customer for a bad user experience, letting a customer think that the product is not good enough increases the costs and decreases sales.

Why do e-commerces have a high return rate?

There are several reasons to explain high return rates in your e-commerce. Some of these reasons are the poor user experience with your product or your website; the product doesn’t fit well; the quality of your product is not as the quality of the 2D image, or the description doesn’t respect the product expectations.

Inaccurate product information and description are one of the main reasons for high return rates in e-commerce.

The product image attracts customers, but they want to make the right decision by reading the product information. If the product information is incorrect or misleading, the customer may receive a product that does not meet their expectations, leading to a return.

A study by MetaPack found that 45% of customers returned an item because it did not match the product description or image.

This point is strictly connected to poor product fit or size. Let us explain.

How Does Poor Fit or Sizing Affect Return?

If your description and product’s information are wrong, the customer will return it for the wrong size when they receive the product.

That is another common reason for high return rates. This case is relevant for clothing and footwear items where customers often rely on the size chart provided by the retailer. If the size chart is inaccurate or the customer receives an incorrect size.

To support this problem, FitForCommerce found that 63% of customers returned clothing due to poor fit or sizing issues.

Obviously, we can’t exclude the measures of a specific type of furniture where the customer can’t know if that piece will suit their house. Some studies have reported furniture return rates ranging from 10–30%, while others have reported higher rates of up to 40%.

And this problem is even more significant than the wrong clothes size because of the cost of delivery that your business has to sustain.

What is the biggest problem with a high return rate?

We can put all these issues with e-commerce under a giant umbrella: poor user experience.

If your clients are not satisfied and they will find to face these issues, they will get a poor user experience in your e-commerce. This problem will lead them to not return any more — not purchase — on your website.

Forrester Research confirms that nearly 80% of online customers stopped doing business with a website due to poor user experience. Also, another study by the Baymard Institute found that a high percentage of online shopping carts are abandoned due to poor user experience, including factors such as slow loading times, confusing navigation, and complicated checkout processes.

This highlights the importance of providing customers with a positive and seamless online shopping experience.

If you don’t face these issues soon, you will suffer from a poor user experience and a lack of sales and clients.

What can you do to reduce high return rates?

In conclusion, poor product descriptions, inaccurate sizing information, and shipping and delivery problems are critical contributors to high return rates in e-commerce.

If you want to know how to reduce your e-commerce return rates, you can download a free paper that will show you a solution for your business by decreasing the return rates and not only. You can download it below!

Originally published at https://eyedex.co

--

--

Antonio Furioso

Antonio Furioso a Product Manager passionate about Augmented Reality & Computer Vision field. Find more information about him on antoniofurioso.com