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CBRE Forecasts Online Holiday Season Returns Could Hit $37B
The voracious growth of e-commerce brings with it a costly byproduct – online returns. A new report by Los Angeles-based CBRE calculates those take-backs could total as much as $37 billion for this holiday season.
Online returns often draw additional attention in December due to the large volume of e-commerce during the holiday season. But the challenge of processing and reselling those returns, often called reverse logistics, has emerged as a year-round conundrum for retailers and shippers.
Typically, the return rate for goods purchased in stores is roughly 8 percent, the rate for online purchases ranges from 15 percent to 30 percent, depending on the merchandise category. Based on those ranges and applied to the projection by eMarketer that online sales will reach $123 billion during this year’s November-December period, returns will add up to a big number in 2018. That’s markedly more than CBRE’s forecast from last holiday season of $32 billion in online returns.
CBRE’s David Egan says, “The speed and efficiency with which a company can process and resell or dispose of online returns can be the difference between making money or losing it on their holiday e-commerce sales. The most effective retailers and shippers have built their supply chain to handle a reverse flow of merchandise, or they have hired the right partners to handle that for them.”
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