Book Description

With the growing popularity of online shopping, increasing product returns started to be a critical topic as they create problems for retailers, such as extra costs and consumer abuse. Especially in the online fashion industry, return rates are expected to be even higher due to the difficulties about making accurate assessments about products without trying them on. Furthermore, looking from a societal point of view, more returns create more air and traffic pollution due to the increasing number of trucks in the traffic, and accordingly contribute to environmental pollution. Although this has been a very up-to-date topic in the recent years, there is not much done in the literature about it, especially when it comes to online fashion shopping. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the associations between consumers return behavior, buying patterns, and environmental attitudes. In this study, the online fashion retailer Zalando was chosen as a case, and an online survey was conducted among Zalando customers in order to measure their attitudes and behaviors about the issue. The results demonstrate that on average, consumers have a high return/order ratio, and most of them order more than one product to try them on at home. Also it was shown that there is a correlation between return frequency, order frequency, buying impulsiveness, and environmental attitudes.*****With the growing popularity of online shopping, increasing product returns started to be a critical topic as they create problems for retailers, such as extra costs and consumer abuse. Especially in the online fashion industry, return rates are expected to be even higher due to the difficulties about making accurate assessments about products without trying them on. Furthermore, looking from a societal point of view, more returns create more air and traffic pollution due to the increasing number of trucks in the traffic, and accordingly contribute to environmental pollution. Although this has been a very up-to-date topic in the recent years, there is not much done in the literature about it, especially when it comes to online fashion shopping. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the associations between consumers return behavior, buying patterns, and environmental attitudes. In this study, the online fashion retailer Zalando was chosen as a case, and an online survey was conducted among Zalando customers in order to measure their attitudes and behaviors about the issue. The results demonstrate that on average, consumers have a high return/order ratio, and most of them order more than one product to try them on at home. Also it was shown that there is a correlation between return frequency, order frequency, buying impulsiveness, and environmental attitudes.