Omnichannel Retailing Complicates Successful Management of Returns

The demands of the omnichannel marketplace are not only changing the way companies fulfill orders, but how they engineer reverse logistics processes. While you need to please the customer, you also need to be profitable.

Consider this common scenario: Since you offer free returns through the mail, customers have a tendency to over-order various styles, colors and sizes, and then mail back the items they don’t want. Now, you have a significant increase in returns coming in via the mail and perhaps through retail stores. How do you handle this efficiently and effectively? How do you ensure that the product goes back into inventory quickly so it can be available for sale again? You don’t want to lose an order because it appears to be out of stock, but was actually returned to a store recently.

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