Currently, 12% of products ordered online won’t stay with the customer, while two years ago this share was still at 10%.
These are the results of the survey commissioned by digital association Bitkom amongst over 1,000 online shoppers in Germany. It shows that one in three online shoppers sends back at most every tenth purchase, while one in four sends back 10 to 25% of all online orders and 14% of shoppers return over 25% of the products they ordered online.
Moreover, the survey shows that return rates are particularly high in product categories such as clothing and they rise from year to year, and the online shoppers who account for most returns are those aged between 14 and 29 years old.
In order to reduce the number of returns, many online shops in Germany already rely on detailed product information and digital customer service solutions such as live chat. However, not all returns can be prevented, since the survey shows that 51% of online shoppers occasionally order products online with the intention of sending them back, because they just want to try different sizes of clothes – 28% does this rarely, 17% sometimes and 6% regularly.
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