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5 Big Questions About Online Shopping

Online shopping is booming in the U.S. But millions of the products we buy online will end up being returned. Here’s what you need to know.

March 28, 2022

By Chrisanne Grisé

1. How popular is online shopping?

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It’s more popular than ever! Experts expect Americans to spend more than $1 trillion buying products online this year. (That’s $1,000,000,000,000.)

The convenience of shopping with only a few clicks has led more people to buy items online. Plus, many companies have made the process more appealing by offering fast, free shipping.

Online sales have really taken off during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many stores closed, and a growing number of people felt more comfortable shopping from home.

2. How has this affected returns?

More online shopping means more returns. If you can’t see, try on, or try out an item in person, you’re more likely to end up with something that isn’t what you want. Experts estimate that shoppers return about 25 percent of what they buy online, compared with about 8 percent of what they buy in stores.

Returning online orders has gotten easier. Many online sellers don’t charge customers for sending back unwanted items. The problem is that many returned items never go back on sale. Instead, they’re often thrown out, even if they’re still brand-new.

3. Why don’t companies resell all the returned products instead of throwing some of them away?

It comes down to cost. When you send back a product, the company already owes you a . It costs the company even more to ship the merchandise to a warehouse to have workers determine if it can be sold again.

“At this stage, every person that touches that item is adding cost, but the company doesn’t earn any value,” explains Gad Allon, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Because of those extra costs, Allon says, most brand-new items that get returned are never sold again as new.

4. Do any returned products get sold again?

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58% of people say they’ve bought multiple sizes or colors at once when shopping online. Source: Narvar

It’s unlikely that the original will sell them again as new, but some do get a second life. For example, many of the items returned to giant retailers like Amazon end up being sold again at discount stores.

Retailers have a particularly huge amount of returned clothing to deal with. That’s partly because many online shoppers buy clothes or footwear in multiple sizes or colors. This practice is known as bracketing. Shoppers pick the items that look and fit best, then return the rest.

“Because it’s so easy to return, we definitely over-buy,” Allon explains.

5. What can we do to address the problem?

If you want to make a difference, consider returning items to a store rather than mailing them back to a warehouse. Experts say those products are more likely to go back on a shelf.

In some cases, online retailers tell buyers to keep their unwanted items rather than send them back. Donating those goods to charity can prevent them from going unused.

Even better, Allon says, is to stop and think before shopping online. If we buy only products that we really need or want, we’ll be much less likely to return them.

“Everything boils down to us as consumers at the end,” he says.