Our Blog

The holiday shopping season is over, and, if you are in the e-commerce business, you probably saw a handsome bump in sales. Nationwide, online purchases increased by about 17 percent during the 2016 holiday shopping season.

Now comes the challenge: holiday returns. Items purchased online have a shockingly high return rate — anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent, depending on the item. (Clothes and electronics tend to have the highest returns). That rate is about three times as high as the return rate of in-store purchases.

A logistical headache and bottom-line buster

Holiday returns create a logistical problem and inflict a very large expense on your bottom line. For businesses that operate purely online, customers are no doubt expecting that you will pay for the full cost of shipping the item back to you. They’ll also expect a full refund. And your resale value of the item is probably greatly diminished, especially if the packaging was opened. Once all the tallying is done, you’ll no doubt lose money on that item.

As e-commerce continues to be the fastest growing segment of the retail market, you can be sure that the amount of returns — and their drag on your bottom line — will grow just as fast. It’s little wonder why CNBC recently called gift returns a “ticking time bomb” that cost retailers $260 billion last year. 

Remedies to consider

With New Year's Day almost upon us, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the past year and start making resolutions for 2017.

If you manage a business, hopefully 2016 was good to you. In general it was a kind year for many e-commerce businesses, with consumers shifting their buying habits heavily toward online retailers. The period between Black Friday and Christmas Eve saw e-commerce sales increase substantially — up 17.2 percent from the prior year. And that shift is predicted to increase again in 2017.

Along with that phenomenal e-commerce growth comes some interesting trends in consumer behavior and expectations. Let’s take a look at three of those trends, and how you can embrace them to make your 2017 more successful and profitable.

Getting your goods through that last mile of the journey to your customers is the hardest and most expensive part of the trip. And now there’s a growing customer demand that has made it even more troublesome to pull off: same-day delivery expectations.

The holiday shopping season is here, and now is the time when your customer service will show whether it deserves candy or coal in its stocking. Your reputation rides on how your company interacts with your customers, many of whom are probably under the seasonal duress that the holidays heap upon them. Those customers may be cranky, short on time, indecisive, confused — they put your customer service to the ultimate test. 

It used to be that Black Friday was the day of days for retail sales. Holiday revenue — and annual receipts for that matter — all hinged on luring huge crowds into stores on Black Friday. But the past few years haven’t been kind to Black Friday in-store sales, including this year. The number of people who went to stores to start their holiday shopping slid downward once again. 

What’s the biggest challenge your supply chain faces? If it’s keeping pace with your customers’ ever-changing demands for faster/cheaper/better delivery service, you are not alone. It’s an issue that’s been topping many of the supply chain surveys of 2016. 

There are a few key reasons delivery service can be challenging. We’ll focus on two big ones in this blog — the last-mile delivery challenge and the cost/convenience factor.  

Even if your pricing is competitive, you may be losing customers to the competition because they’re doing these things right.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about one of the most dynamic new trends in e-commerce: cross-channel sales. This is the trend toward consumers selecting and buying their items online and picking them up at a physical location, be it a retail store or distribution center.

The business of retail sales is changing fast. Study after study documents the meteoric rise of e-commerce, a sales phenomenon that is growing roughly four times faster than retail sales overall. By the end of this year, retail sales through online channels are expected to grow to $1.9 trillion worldwide, a 23% increase over last year’s figures.

It's the holiday sales season, and, for retail e-commerce sellers, that means the two most lucrative months of business are here.