Executive Summary

This report forms part of our Innovator Intelligence series, which focuses on emerging companies disrupting traditional retail and fueling innovation across the retail value chain.

• Returns are a costly and growing headache for retailers. As e-commerce continues to grab a greater share of the retail market, the overall retail return rate will continue to climb.
• Customers increasingly consider fast, free and easy returns to be a basic right of online shopping, making return costs one of the retail industry’s most expensive problems.
• Shoppers returned $396 billion worth of purchases in 2018 – brick-and-mortar and online, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).
• To control costs and improve the customer experience, retailers are continually looking for technology solutions that identify the root causes of returns by expanding return-centric knowledge about suppliers and customers.
• Newmine’s Chief Returns Officer is an AI-powered returns reduction platform that helps retailers manage and reduce returns by collecting internal and external data, incorporating data science for analysis, alerting the relevant teams to root causes in near real time, managing resolutions and measuring success.

See below for the full report.