In recent years, a significant shift has emerged in eCommerce: the rise of “heavy returns”—where consumers order multiple items, often in different sizes or colors, and return most of them, sometimes keeping only one. While this behavior aligns with modern consumer expectations for flexibility and convenience, it poses significant challenges for retailers, especially in terms of cost management, operational complexity, and fraud prevention.
This trend, while normalizing in the eyes of consumers, creates logistical and financial strain for businesses that must handle the influx of returns, often without the right systems in place to manage them efficiently. Compounding the issue is the fact that frequent returns are increasingly flagged as potential fraud by existing systems, leading to false positives, customer dissatisfaction, and additional costs for companies.
Heavy returns are driven largely by the growth of eCommerce and changing consumer expectations. With the proliferation of free shipping and returns policies, consumers feel more comfortable ordering several variations of a product to try on at home and return what they don’t need. This behavior is particularly common in the fashion industry, where customers may order the same item in multiple sizes to find the best fit, or in different colors to see which works best.
According to a report by Narvar, 58% of shoppers buy variations of the same item with the intent to return those that don’t work out. What was once seen as a hassle—making returns—is now an essential part of the buying journey. Retailers have trained customers to expect returns to be quick, easy, and cost-free, leading to a dramatic increase in return volumes.
This surge in returns isn’t limited to fashion; across industries, consumers are adopting a “try-before-you-buy” mentality that places the onus on retailers to absorb the cost and complexity of returns management.
While free and easy returns are attractive to consumers, they come with significant costs for retailers. Managing a high volume of returns requires streamlined logistics, clear processes, and efficient customer service—all of which can be costly to implement and maintain. For companies with poorly optimized returns systems, the impact can be crippling.
Key cost drivers associated with returns include:
One of the unintended consequences of the heavy returns trend is the rise in false positives for fraud detection. Fraud detection systems typically flag unusual patterns of behavior, such as frequent returns, as potentially fraudulent activity. In theory, this makes sense—high return rates could signal return abuse or friendly fraud, where customers claim items were never received or manipulate return policies to their advantage.
However, these systems often can’t distinguish between genuine customers who are simply returning items as part of their shopping process and those who are abusing return policies. As a result, loyal customers who frequently shop and return items can find themselves mistakenly flagged as fraudsters, leading to frustrating experiences like account holds, denials of returns, or even being banned from future purchases.
These false positives not only harm customer relationships but also increase costs for businesses. Manual review of flagged accounts, additional customer service calls, and lost sales opportunities all contribute to the burden that returns fraud can place on a company.
To combat the complexities and costs associated with the heavy returns trend, many retailers are turning to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers for solutions. BPOs can play a key role in streamlining returns management, improving fraud detection systems, and enhancing the overall customer experience.
BPOs can help retailers create more efficient returns processes by leveraging automated systems that handle the bulk of the work. This includes automating the generation of return labels, streamlining communication with customers, and ensuring that returned items are processed quickly and accurately. By minimizing manual intervention, BPOs help retailers reduce the cost of handling returns while improving customer satisfaction.
In addition, BPOs can assist with reverse logistics, providing scalable solutions to manage the increased volume of returns during peak shopping periods, such as holidays or sales events. By outsourcing these functions, retailers can avoid the need for hiring temporary staff or overextending their internal teams.
Advanced BPOs utilize AI-driven analytics and machine learning models to distinguish between legitimate returns behavior and potential fraud. These tools analyze customer data across multiple touchpoints to identify patterns that indicate whether a high return rate is due to genuine consumer behavior or malicious intent.
BPOs can also implement more nuanced fraud detection systems, which reduce false positives by incorporating additional data points, such as purchase history, customer loyalty status, and past interactions. By providing real-time fraud detection and adaptive learning models, BPOs help retailers prevent fraudulent returns while maintaining a positive customer experience for loyal shoppers.
One of the key advantages of partnering with a BPO is the ability to scale operations quickly and cost-effectively. As return volumes fluctuate throughout the year, BPOs can provide on-demand support, allowing retailers to handle spikes in returns without overburdening internal resources.
By outsourcing returns management and fraud detection, retailers can reduce their operational overhead while improving the speed and efficiency of their processes. This not only lowers costs but also enhances customer satisfaction by ensuring that returns are handled quickly and fairly.
The trend of heavy returns is unlikely to disappear any time soon, as consumers continue to prioritize flexibility and convenience in their shopping experiences. For retailers, the challenge lies in balancing the cost of accommodating this behavior with the need to prevent return abuse and fraud.
By partnering with BPOs, retailers can optimize their returns processes, enhance fraud detection capabilities, and reduce the overall complexity of managing heavy returns. In doing so, they can continue to meet consumer expectations while protecting their bottom line and maintaining positive customer relationships.
As the retail landscape continues to evolve, companies that invest in efficient returns management and smart fraud prevention strategies will be better positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
