27% don't know what a return costs

27% of DACH online retailers cannot say what processing a single returned item costs them.

That's EHI's survey of 124 retailers, published last November.

The volume isn't in doubt. In textiles, one in eight retailers gets more than half of all orders back.

Now the part left out of every returns panel. Under the Consumer Rights Directive the consumer has 14 days to withdraw.

The 14 days are mandatory. Who pays is not enforced on sellers, the default is the customer.

So free returns aren't a compliance cost. They're marketing spend, filed under logistics. And return is an important touchpoint of every retailer.

But it is still a number push down, and to do that, there isn't one lever. There are four (and more?) and what a company reaches for follows from what it already owns.

Zara pulled place: free in store, charged by post. Read as a fee it's trivial; read as routing it moves reverse logistics onto store labour already on the payroll and turns a refund into footfall.

H&M pulled price, selectively, postal returns charged, members exempt. That's enrolment, priced in small change.

Zalando hasn't followed with a fee. It pulled time, cutting its return window from 100 days to 30 across most markets from January 2025. And prediction, the expensive one: it publishes a 50% item return rate, says a third of returns are size-related, and runs an in-house fit team it calls unique in Europe.

Note which levers Zalando picked. A fee appears on the refund and gets screenshotted. A shorter window is invisible until you're standing outside it, and prevention is invisible entirely.

If you are a €30m brand with no stores, no loyalty tier and no fit data, three of those four are closed, which is why the advice you get arrives as a fee you're nervous (understandably) to charge.

One number worth building (which you kind of should have this one by now) this quarter isn't your return rate. It's contribution margin after returns, per SKU. Some will come out negative. If you don’t have a good reason to keep them, could be a time for some good old assortment review.