An inevitable side effect of e-commerce is the
returns process. Or is it? Returns result in significant waste in
logistics sector – certainly in terms of time, energy and packaging materials. It takes
time to do something about those returns.
Every year, 1.2 million items of clothing are
destroyed. These are items of clothing that, even after repeated markdowns, do not
. They end up in the incinerator or are fed into the shredder,
after which the shredded fabric is processed into felt.
The figures come from a startling study that
was published at the start of the July sales. The survey was
carried out by the agency Conclusr on behalf of MVO Nederland, for which 379
retailers and wholesalers were surveyed. The study reveals that
far more items of clothing remain unsold – 21.5 million in total. The
Largest proportion of these goes to charities and outlet centres or is sold as
clearance stock to buyers. Because of all these unsold garments, retailers are
a loss of turnover amounting to 313.5 million euros.
I wonder whether the number of garments destroyed
isn’t actually much higher than that 1.2 million. A logistics manager
who had personally faced challenges in the field of returns logistics drew my attention
to the returns issues faced by online clothes shops. Suppose they
receive a pair of jeans back whose cost price might be as little as ten euros.
How much time would you give an employee to inspect the returned jeans,
inspect, recondition, pack and put back into stock
? Is it even worth the effort to put all that time into a pair of jeans?
It is clear that the whole issue of returns causes a great deal of
. Perhaps not in terms of goods, but certainly in terms of the time,
energy and packaging materials required to dispatch those goods
and send them back again. How socially responsible are online shops that
encourage returns by not charging for them? This raises
to order six items of clothing in three different colours and two different
sizes, and then sending five of them back. And that still leaves the
question remains as to whether all those returned items are actually put back into stock
.
Even when the item is available for sale again,
the pain hasn’t completely gone away. The logistics manager I spoke to
had recently started using an automated storage and order-picking system himself.
The items returned by his customers were, in his system,
stock. However, that is easier said than done. If he follows the
standard putaway procedure, he ends up with a plastic bin
containing just one item instead of twenty or thirty. This results in
a very expensive storage location for just one item. The problem was
solved by using an order-picking station for the reverse process: an
employee spends a period of time doing nothing but placing returned items back into
the correct stock bin.
What can we do to
? First and foremost, by providing more information during the purchasing process
about, for example, the fit and sizing of products. And by developing smart tools
that allow people to see on their tablet or PC which model or
colour will or won’t suit them. The question is whether that’s enough. Perhaps we should
we stop making returning items so appealing.
For example, by charging a fee for this. Isn’t that part of
corporate social responsibility?
Marcel te Lindert - journalist logistics & supply chain
