Comment by pythonistic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pythonistic | Hacker News Reader

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Working at an on-line shoes, apparel, and accessories retailer, my understanding is that there are four categories of people regularly returning items:

* Stylists - they buy for a client (celebrities, wealthy people) and send back things that don't look appropriate

* Entertainment - TV and movies regularly buy a lot of clothes and return most of them

* Renters - people who may spend tens of thousands of dollars per year but only have $2,000 in lifetime sales -- everything else is returned

* Legitimate customers - they might buy two or three of the same item to find the one that fits

There are things we do to help with the last case and to help people figure out what will fit before they purchase the item, and those have been proven to work. Stylists and Entertainment buyers are tolerated. Renters get picked out with data analysis, but the queries tend to be expensive in time and resources and require human discretion, something missing in the Best Buy story.

Renters - people who may spend tens of thousands of dollars per year but only have $2,000 in lifetime sales -- everything else is returned

Massive problem in jewellery - people "buy" an item, wear it to that dinner party to impress their friends, return it a day or two later saying "when I got it home I decided it didn't suit me"

Restocking fee should take care of that.

Then that pisses off the "legitimate" returners. It's a fine line.

Would it make sense to have retailers that cater to these heavy returners? Charge them a subscription and give them a monthly box they can return items in, allow partial refunds with a well described contract, and generally work with their use cases?

I think I first saw one of those nearly a decade ago: it was definitely high-end, catering to men, and all designer labels. I honestly don't know if it survived or failed because the category isn't interesting to me.

Returns are the problem: returns may not get the nice discounts for shipping, they require manual review of the products (are it the correct SKU, the correct size, is it in a resellable condition, etc.), restocking and reinsertion into buyable inventory, etc. And then refund processing, which may take 7-10 days or more.

But it doesn't address the problem of renters: they won't buy a subscription box if there's a monthly fee associated with it. They like being able to get new shoes, clothes, and accessories to wear once and then return for free. Identifying renters and either directly contacting them to change their behavior (this is high touch, but the company culture encourages this) or removing them as customers are the best solutions I've seen to date.

There are already services that do this. I've seen ads for a shoe service (name escapes me) and a clothing service (Gwynnie Bee).

Zappos (owned by Amazon) has unlimited returns for a year. It makes shopping for shoes really convenient — you can order multiple sizes, styles, etc and just send back the ones you don’t want to keep.

The downside is that you buy them all and get a refund on return.

You mean Stitch Fix?

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