The e-commerce sale doesn't end at checkout. So why do we stop measuring there?

(Aleks Sztemberg) - With $849.9 billion in U.S. merchandise returns projected for 2025, retailers may be overlooking one of their most valuable sources of customer insight: what happens after the purchase.

By Aleks Sztemberg

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

As a co-founder of an analytics platform for e-commerce, I have noticed something interesting. When we speak to product teams, all they focus on are sales numbers. Improving the shopping experience, making sure the user finalizes the purchase.

But as I am writing this, somewhere around me, a good pair of jeans is heading back to the warehouse.

Don't get me wrong. Returns are hardly a new problem. Alongside shopping cart abandonment, they're one of the biggest headaches in e-commerce. At the NXT Commerce conference I attended last year, several major brands were talking about exactly this challenge.

And the numbers confirm this.

According to the National Retail Federation's 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report, U.S. retailers projected that customers would return approximately $849.9 billion worth of merchandise in 2025. The research included a survey of 358 e-commerce professionals at large U.S. retailers.

Of course, $849.9 billion in returned merchandise doesn't mean $849.9 billion in losses. Many products are resold. But add to this the costs of shipping, handling, inspection, repackaging, customer service and discounts on products that can no longer be sold at full price, and you start to wonder how much profit disappears along the way.

And more importantly, how much of this could be prevented without worsening the shopping experience or affecting sales numbers?

Teams we speak to spend most of their time and budgets on understanding what makes people buy.

It's already difficult, sure. But what really impacts revenue is knowing where they come from, which products they view, how long they spend comparing options and what finally convinces them to click that "BUY" button.

But what happens after that?

In many businesses, a return is treated as a separate transaction. Someone in logistics handles it, customer service processes the refund, and the product hopefully makes it back into inventory...or not.

Now, what's really interesting for me is what happened before the return.

Take fashion, for example. According to the European Environment Agency's 2024 report, around 20% of clothing and 30% of footwear purchased online in Europe get returned.

Perhaps shoppers regularly order three sizes, try them at home, and send two back, or maybe they added an extra item by accident. Or the photo is different online and in reality.

These are very different problems, and they require very different solutions.

Yet if all you're looking at is total sales and total returns, you'll probably never know the difference.

Here's a statistic I found particularly interesting.

In DHL's 2025 e-commerce shopper research, based on 24,000 online shoppers across 24 countries, 54% cited the wrong size as a reason for returning an item. And 55% cited poor quality or faulty products.

Meanwhile, in DHL's 2025 business survey, which surveyed 4,050 businesses across 19 countries, only 24% selected incorrect sizing among the main reasons for returns, and 26% selected poor quality or faulty products.

Sure, different groups are answering different questions, so these figures don't prove that retailers don't understand why customers return. But they suggest there may be a gap worth investigating.

We also need to remember that customers may give answers just to process the form, sometimes picking an option because it is the easiest. So to truly understand the reason why, we need to dig deeper into behaviors, segments and patterns.

What I also think is interesting is how we talk about the customers who return products as if they belong to one and the same group.

Imagine two customers.

One orders 20 products over six months and returns three, the other one orders four products and returns three.

Both have generated three returns. Are their cases really the same?

The first might be a loyal, profitable customer. The second may be considerably more expensive to serve.

Even knowing this, we'd need to look at the value of their purchases, margins and reasons for returning before drawing conclusions.

The NRF's 2025 consumer survey, which included 2,006 consumers who had returned at least one online purchase in the previous 12 months, found that 82% consider free returns important when shopping online, and 71% say they're less likely to purchase from a retailer again after a poor return experience.

And I can relate. I don't like to pay for delivery, even if I know that the cost might be hidden in the price. I want to feel that it was free, and returns as well. No questions asked. Otherwise, I won't buy.

That's quite a dilemma. Brands need to reduce the cost of returns, but customers increasingly expect returns to be easy and free in order to buy at all.

Let's imagine a hypothetical large retailer who generates €10 million in annual online sales, with a 20% return rate by sales value.

Those are pretty realistic numbers, by the way.

That's €2 million worth of merchandise coming back in our hypothetical example.

Let's say that company could reduce the return rate from 20% to 18% without any impact on sales or customer experience.

Maybe two percentage points don't sound like a lot, but that's €200,000 worth of additional merchandise retained, assuming sales remain unchanged.

Sure, it is not €200,000 in additional profit, but it's potentially meaningful savings in processing, shipping and other return-related costs. Better than firing people, for example, as an optimization strategy.

But where to look?

How I would do it is quite simple, actually.

Identify the products with the highest return rates, compare them with similar products, and examine whether particular customer groups, campaigns or purchasing behaviors stand out.

Then you can compare purchases after they've had enough time to be returned. A product sold yesterday hasn't had the same opportunity to come back as one sold three weeks ago.

Lastly, test one improvement at a time and measure what happens, not only to returns but also to conversion and customer satisfaction.

After all, reducing returns by discouraging people from buying is hardly a success.

And here's food for thought: What if the return is just another way of receiving customer feedback?

There's an environmental side to this conversation too.

The European Environment Agency estimated in its 2024 report that between 22% and 43% of returned clothing purchased online in Europe ends up being destroyed. Its definition includes recycling and other forms of disposal, not just incineration.

I'd like to clarify that we should make a distinction between the returns that would happen anyway, and those that can be prevented by changes in the interface, better user experience, improving the customer journey or better customer service.

But what I keep thinking about is that e-commerce has become incredibly sophisticated at understanding how to get customers to buy. We can measure practically every interaction leading up to checkout.

Yet we are sweeping under the carpet the fact that we often pay far less attention to understanding why some of those purchases don't work out.

Maybe it's time we started treating a return not just as a refund, but as valuable feedback about the shopping experience.

Because a successful sale isn't necessarily the one that happens at checkout.

It's the one the customer decides to keep.

Aleks Sztemberg

Aleks Sztemberg is the Co-Founder at Stormly. an AI-powered analytics platform for e-commerce businesses. She works with retailers and product teams to better understand customer behaviour, uncover opportunities to improve shopping experiences, and turn complex data into actionable insights, from improving conversions to reducing preventable returns.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.