By

Sandra Halliday Published December 31, 2024 Reading time
2 minutes Download
Print
Text size

US retail returns hit a high and fraud runs riot

By

Sandra Halliday Published
December 31, 2024

An increasing use of aids like sizing tech and data-driven buying may be helping consumers make more informed purchase decisions and putting what they want in front of them, but they continue to return a large percentage of the goods they buy to stores and worse still, returns fraud is on the rise.

That’s the conclusion of a new US report from Appriss Retail (which provides data and analytics solutions for reducing retail losses and combating return and claim fraud) and Deloitte.

Total merchandise returns for the past year reached $685 billion, representing 13.21% of total retail sales, which amounted to $5.19 trillion in 2024, according to the report.