We need to talk about returns

Showrooming isn’t all that bad

Zara and H&M, the big bad fast fashion giants, are charging online shoppers for returns now.

It’s easy for everyone in the sustainability bubble to think that this is something to do with the environment, but it’s more about costs. Returns are expensive — the numbers really add up when you ship a product back to a logistics centre, and when someone there unpacks, inspects and restocks it. It’s become an inevitable part of the fashion business, as shoppers pick up the habit of “showrooming” — ordering a bunch of stuff online, and returning what they don’t want.

Return rates are really high for e-commerce — BoF reports that 33.7% of everything Boohoo sells online gets sent back — but for the mass-market, corporate brands dominating the industry, it’s just another number on a spreadsheet. A higher return rate increases your expenses, which lowers your margins, and therefore your profit (and what do you do when profits are down? Try and sell more stuff).

Showrooming can have a bigger impact on smaller businesses, though, because it takes valuable products out of circulation. The buyer for a high-end store told me that they only buy one in each size for their most expensive ready-to-wear pieces. So if someone orders the Prada pants in a S, M and L to see which fits best, the store has thousands of euros in merchandise out of stock for weeks. And because most retailers go into markdown mode so quickly, often months before the season ends, once the order comes back, there’s not much time left to sell it at full price.

This is all before we consider the environmental impact of shipping all these packages around, and the human beings doing it. And then there’s the scary rumors of returned products being thrown away because they’re not considered sellable, or because it’s cheaper to trash them than to pay a logistics center to restock them. Here’s yet another part of the fashion puzzle that desperately needs transparency and regulation.

But that’s the bigger picture. When it comes to my little pocket of the industry — relatively expensive clothes made by independent brands and sold in curated retail environments — I’m not sure that showrooming needs to be such a big deal.