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Customer Intent

Great interview on the true cost of customer experience from a seller's perspective. A generous return policy is a key component of great customer experience. There are examples of best in class in that area like Nordstrom's, Lands End, REI, LL Bean and the like. Their products are expensive and the cost of supporting such return policy is a big part of why:

I think that the race for market share in online retail really created a whole host of bad behaviors that are both costly to them and other retailers, but are also just flat out environmentally destructive and really need to stop. 

We have to really blame Amazon and especially Zappos (who Amazon owns) for driving most of these bad behaviors which most other retailers were forced to go along with or even try to one-up in the race for market share. 

The consumer expectation now is that not only will you get a product in a day or two at most, but that you can return it for any reason, and that if you say the product is ‘defective’, then the return shipping is free. So of course, everything returned is claimed to be defective! 

The best system when stressed enough by a significant number of bad actors can misfire badly. So is the case with return policies. As Josh Poertner says in the interview - 99.8% of the customers are good but the stress produced by the 0.2% is bad enough to warrant drastic change. The better way might be to take a data driven approach to flag return fraud behavior so only the bad actors are penalized instead of everyone.

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