It may come as a shock that online retailers have significantly higher product return rates than brick-and-mortar stores.
After all, re-packaging items, driving them to the post office, and shipping your purchases back tend to be much more of a hassle.
Nonetheless, this does not seem to be stopping people around the world because now, thirty percent of all online purchases end up being returned.
This rate is over twenty percent higher than brick-and-mortar retailers!
And if you are wondering what this high return rate means for massive retailers like Amazon, the answer is a ton of extra inventory.
For example, in 2017, Amazon facilitated the shipping of over five billion items worldwide.
This means that 1.5 billion of those items ended up back in warehouses while Amazon searches for their next homes.
So, to help solve this problem, customers are now able to buy full pallets of returned items at a fraction of their original price.
The pallets can either be a mystery mix of undisclosed items or are categorized– for example, home furniture, health, and beauty, or electronics.

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