[New Tang Dynasty News, Beijing time, November 18, 2022]The popularity of the “Double Eleven” shopping festival in mainland China this year has cooled down significantly, but the tide of returned goods after the festival has become crazier than ever. Compared with previous years, in addition to common reasons such as slow delivery, lost items, impulsive consumption, and merchant recalls, this year also added the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control, which caused logistics obstruction, and the sharp increase in the return rate will soon push Chinese merchants to “force crazy.
After this year’s Double Eleven came to an end, a wave of consumers “retiring and retreating” followed one after another. Some merchants said in an interview with the media that this year’s return rate is significantly higher than in previous years, generally reaching about 30% to 40%, and some merchants’ return rates even exceed 50%.
According to a report by the financial account “Shenran”, the young Xiao Yu bought 15 pieces of clothing from an e-commerce platform on Double Eleven this year, and spent about 2,000 yuan (RMB, the same below). After the arrival of the goods, only 6 pieces were left after trying them on, and 9 pieces were returned, and the final total cost was about 1,000 yuan.
The 24-year-old Qinglu’s community was closed for ten days due to the COVID-19 epidemic in early November, and the nearby express outlets were also closed. After Double Eleven, although the community has been unsealed, some express delivery still cannot be delivered, which directly caused her to be unable to receive various goods purchased online.
Qinglu said that there was another piece of clothing because the pre-sale time was too long. I placed the order out of passion at first, but after calming down and thinking about it, I changed my mind and decided to return it.
Xiaoxiao, who is 35 years old, bought 54 orders before November 1, and returned 15 orders; on the evening of November 11, she placed a total of 25 orders and returned 14 orders. There are three main reasons for her return: merchant recall, lost item, and slow delivery. Because a product was lost during the delivery process, she also had a dispute with the merchant, and she returned all the orders carried by the express company in a fit of anger.
Consumers do not need to bear the cost of returning goods, but the rising return rate has almost driven all merchants crazy. For merchants, returning goods will not only increase logistics costs, but also increase the return rate due to the backlog of goods in warehouses, loss of defective products, store ratings, user complaints, and even the amount of future freight insurance. When interviewed, some merchants complained that it was very frustrating to deal with returns after Double Eleven.
According to the merchant’s introduction: Even if the returned product has not been shipped, after the merchant cancels the generated order on the system, he has to go to the warehouse to find the product that has been packaged and ready to be shipped, tear off the face sheet and restore it to the shelf; if it has already been sent If the express shipment is returned, you need to contact the express company to recall it, and if it is too late to recall, you must notify the user to reject it.
Under normal circumstances, undelivered goods need to pay 2~3 yuan for the face order and delivery cost, and at least 5 yuan for express delivery if the goods are recalled. As for the return of the product after the user signs for it, the merchant will also bear part of the return fee after the freight insurance is deducted.
In addition to the obvious increase in logistics costs, the returned goods will increase the loss of defective products of the merchant, and the loss of defective products and labor costs will all occur in this process.
If the merchant chooses to invite experts to live broadcast the goods during the promotion, it may face more unexpected losses. A food merchant named Yang Fan was cheated not long ago.
According to reports, in order to sell a batch of goods, Yang Fan contacted three MCN organizations to help him sell a batch of goods, and the experts under these organizations would broadcast the goods live on Taobao and Douyin. Two of them had a transaction volume of more than 10,000 orders after the live broadcast. It seemed that the promotion effect was very high. Unexpectedly, there were a large number of return orders before they were shipped. The return rate was as high as 70% and 95% respectively. Obviously these two The agency made fake orders; another agency did not fake, but its sales were extremely low. In the end, the batch of goods that I wanted to deal with was not sold, but I lost nearly 700,000 yuan for handling the returned goods.
Some merchants revealed that one of the main reasons for the high return rate is that due to epidemic prevention, more than 300 places across the country cannot deliver goods, resulting in many orders being returned because they cannot be delivered in time.
(Comprehensive report by reporter He Yating/Editor in charge: Lin Qing)
URL of this article: https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2022/11/17/a103577191.html