News / Rising costs driving online shopping merchants to the point of no returns

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Online shopping appears to be rapidly approaching a point of no return; steeply escalating costs are eroding margins, forcing merchants to look for alternative solutions to returning unwanted goods to their warehouses.

According to the National Retail Federation, in the US, merchandise worth $761bn was returned last year – about 16% of all purchases – up from 10% in 2020. For online purchases, the return rate was 20.8%, up from 18.1% in 2020.

But by some estimates, cross-border sellers were seeing a ...