Many brands within the e-commerce began to return the money of the purchases that consumers do not want, but without thinking about recovering the product. One of the most visible points of 2020 and the pandemic, is that online sales increased significantly, even in areas where perhaps customers were more distant like the supermarkets.
This sudden increase as the months went by, brought with it new goals and problems to be solved. One of them is the logistics of deliveries, as the amount of packages purchased by consumers increases. During the pandemic in Spain, for example, delivery times for certain packages increased, with priority given to basic necessities.
Another aspect is the increase in returns. By making more mistakes in purchases because of not being able to walk through the aisles of the physical store, the margin for trial and error has risen dramatically. For this reason, the new paradox of ecommerce is how to solve the balance of the sale and the cost of a return. In some cases, it ends up being better for the owners of the organizations to return the money but let the customer have the product. In the United States, the companies themselves recommend that they donate them in case they don’t want them or use them, as defined by The Wall Street Journal. Among the companies that made this type of decision are Amazon, Walmart or Target.
In 2020, the packages that had to be processed to accept returns in online stores increased by 70% over the previous year. The costs of the Christmas campaigns in ecommerce in the United States reached 70.5 billion dollars, 73% more than five years ago.
To analyze the return of money but not the product, organizations use artificial intelligence and analysis of consumer purchasing patterns to define when it pays to spend money back. If the product is small and of little value, and it cannot be sold again, companies decide not to return it, beyond the money. For large companies, this is not an economic loss and for consumers it generates great confidence and comfort.