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Many Unhappy Returns Coming This Holiday Season
from the not-so-cross-channel dept
While many brick-and-mortar stores are hyping up their "cross-channel" options for customers to buy goods online and return them at a local store, a new study suggests that most retailers aren't prepared for a situation where many people do so. Most have set up very simple systems that just won't scale. For example, many require a manager to get involved and "override" the system to process the return. Also, the study found that a significant number of returns required in-store employees to phone the e-commerce operations to complete the the return. While it's nice that stores are finally offering this functionality, a bad implementation isn't going to do them much good if they get swamped with in-store returns.
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Separate Entities
I think the problem is that companies spin off and treat the online store as a separate entity from the physical stores. They do this so that they can avoid charging sales tax. The resulting problem is that they have two separate databases and order systems. The stores only have access to the data from in-store receipts and don't have access to online order data.
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