The Wall Street Journal carried an article last week about the problems consumer electronics etailers are having with returns.

Only 5% of returns were due to defective products and etailers spent $13.8m (£7bn) reselling returned products, so how best to deal with what is clearly a major issue?

Retailers clearly want to make it as easy as possible to make purchases via their websites, whilst at the same time making the returns policy as transparent as possible.

How do you think retailers can minimise returns?  We had a quick brainstorm at the office and came up with the following:

• Provide clear instructions, so that customers know how to use products they buy.
• Provide excellent after sales support for customers that are confused about how to operate their purchase.
• Technical support information on the retailers website, complete with a community of users that can offer a helping hand.
• Provide customers with extra information before they buy to ensure that customers buy exactly what they want.
• One tip from the WSJ article is to let customers personalise products.

We think that’s a reasonable list, but can you think of any others that would minimise the number of products returned?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Online shopping news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.