Even before the pandemic struck high returns was a problem in the industry with a quarter of all fashion goods bought online in 2019 sent back, according to the 2020 IMRG Returns Review. But since Covid-19 a study from Mintel found that almost half of UK online shoppers had sent something back in the past year, rising to 60% for those aged 16-34.
Before the pandemic, scientists at the Data Visualisation Observatory (DVO) at Alliance MBS had already begun helping the industry to better understand and map the problem.
Specifically, they partnered with Rebound Returns, a company which looks after online returns for a number of leading online fashion retailers, on a project which clustered customers according to their spending behaviour and profitability for retailers. It then mapped that information with specific data around their returns behaviour and also overlaid demographics such as the customer’s gender to build up a detailed dataset.
Read the full article at https://promo.manchester.edu.hk/news-detail.php?id=214&page=3
