I came across this PC World story (a ComputerWord story has a slightly different view) that says what I’ve always seen when I worked in retail hell. 95% of all returned gadgets that customers believe are defective actually work. The reasons why they are returned are:
- 68 Percent of returns are products that work properly but do not meet customers’ expectations for some reason.
- 27 Percent of returns are due to buyer’s remorse.
This is a huge issue for retailers as they often have to sell these returned goods as “open box” items, usually at a loss.
There is another factor at play here:
“Complicated setup is one issue: The Accenture report cites a 2006 study by Dutch scientist Elke den Ouden, which determined that the average U.S. consumer spends only 20 minutes trying to make a device work before giving up and returning it to the seller.”
So perhaps if companies made these gizmos simpler to use and people perhaps RTFM‘ed, this would not be as evident.
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This entry was posted on June 3, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Commentary with tags gadgets, Retail, returns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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95% Of Returned Gadgets Still Work… Ouch!
I came across this PC World story (a ComputerWord story has a slightly different view) that says what I’ve always seen when I worked in retail hell. 95% of all returned gadgets that customers believe are defective actually work. The reasons why they are returned are:
This is a huge issue for retailers as they often have to sell these returned goods as “open box” items, usually at a loss.
There is another factor at play here:
“Complicated setup is one issue: The Accenture report cites a 2006 study by Dutch scientist Elke den Ouden, which determined that the average U.S. consumer spends only 20 minutes trying to make a device work before giving up and returning it to the seller.”
So perhaps if companies made these gizmos simpler to use and people perhaps RTFM‘ed, this would not be as evident.
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This entry was posted on June 3, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Commentary with tags gadgets, Retail, returns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.