Adam Minter, Columnist

What Online Retailers Hate About Holiday Shopping

You can send back that ugly sweater for free. But for merchants, it's a huge expense.

December 22, 2017 at 10:00 AM UTC

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

Two-way street.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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For retailers, December isn't just the holiday shopping season. It's also holiday return season, when consumers decide to send back all the stuff that didn't fit, work or meet expectations.

It's an expensive ritual. According to the National Retail Federation, returns account for around 8 percent of total annual retail sales. Online retailers face an even heavier burden, with returns averaging 25 percent of all goods purchased and as much as half of apparel. If those percentages hold through the 2017 holidays, online retailers could face $32.1 billion worth of returns on projected holiday-season sales of $107 billion, according to the consulting firm CBRE.