The Return Season
January has a strange double life in e-commerce. Outwardly it’s all fresh starts, planning and habit trackers. Backstage, it’s something very different: the single biggest month of the year for products going backwards. While we’re putting decorations away, a second peak season is unfolding in warehouses, vans and sorting centres – the “return season”.
In the US, the first week of January even has a name: National Returns Week. It’s not just a marketing phrase. In 2024, almost one in five online purchases ended in a return. Between 2 and 10 January, some carriers handled 100–150% more returns than in a typical month. The Christmas rush doesn’t simply end; it flips direction. The same items that sped through the network in December now retrace their steps in a messy, fragmented way that few customers ever see.
Returns are often treated as an afterthought – a small print detail at the bottom of the checkout page. In reality, they are a full-blown logistics system layered on top of the original one. A delivered parcel usually follows a relatively clean path: hub → regional depot → van → your door. A returned parcel rarely enjoys that simplicity. It might go from your home to a local shop, back to a regional depot, across the country to a central returns centre, then on again to a refurbisher or outlet. On average, a returned parcel travels around three times as far as a delivered one. The climate impact reflects that: the logistics behind returns are estimated to generate up to 5 million tons of CO₂ each year worldwide, and a typical return produces almost the same emissions as the original delivery. Every “send it back, it’s easy” doubles the environmental load of that purchase.
And that’s only the part that moves. A disturbing share of returns never find a new owner. Somewhere between 25–30% of returned products never go back on the shelf. They are damaged in transit, opened in a way that makes them hard to resell, or simply not worth the labour and materials required to inspect, clean, repackage and redistribute. For some categories it is cheaper to write items off than to rework them. The result: billions in value literally thrown away. In the US alone, an estimated 10 billion dollars’ worth of returned goods end up as waste each year. These are not abstract numbers; they’re trainers worn once for a mirror selfie, dresses with the tags reattached, gadgets that didn’t quite match the colour on screen.
So why does the system look like this? Because we designed it that way – together. From the shopper’s perspective, generous returns are reassuring. 92% of customers say they only buy if returns are easy. 67% actively seek out brands that offer simple, fast, often free returns. No-hassle returns boost conversion, reduce purchase anxiety and support “try at home” behaviour. In a crowded market, saying “keep the box, we’ll handle the rest” has become a competitive baseline. For retailers, though, this convenience comes at a price: handling returns can be three to four times more expensive than the original delivery, and in some sectors the cost of January returns can quietly eat 20–30% of monthly profit. The business model absorbs the pain; the city and the climate carry the side effects.
The paradox is hard to ignore. We talk about sustainable packaging, greener delivery options and carbon-neutral checkout buttons – and then we casually normalise sending half of it back. The psychology behind this is simple: free, easy returns remove the “brake” from the decision. It becomes rational to over-order and decide later. For some categories, especially fashion, the system almost encourages people to treat their homes as fitting rooms. Yet every wrong size and every impulse purchase triggers more vans, more sorting, more warehouse space, more waste.
If we want January to look different, we don’t need to abolish returns. We need to make them smarter. Part of this is upstream: better sizing tools, clearer product information, realistic photos and videos that reduce the need for guesswork. If roughly 60% of returns are due to sizing issues, even a modest improvement here removes thousands of unnecessary journeys. Part of it is behavioural: nudging customers to bundle returns into a single pickup, or to drop them off along existing routes instead of summoning a dedicated van for one box. And part of it is logistical: designing reverse logistics that use existing city movement – people, bikes, shared pickup points – rather than sending another vehicle around the block.
None of this destroys convenience. It reframes it. Convenience doesn’t have to mean “frictionless at any cost”. It can mean transparent options at checkout: home pickup if you really need it, but also a slower, lower-impact “green return” that plugs into the natural rhythm of the city. It can mean rewarding customers who choose the lower-emission option, or who think twice before ordering three sizes “just in case”. Small design decisions – a default choice, a short explanation, a tiny incentive – can shift thousands of parcels onto a smarter path.
January shines a very bright light on everything we don’t see about e-commerce the rest of the year. The trucks leaving depots in the dark with gifts in December are the visible, charming side of online shopping. The trucks coming back in January with returns are its mirror image. They force us to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions: how much trial and error do we really need? Where does responsibility sit – with brands, platforms, delivery partners, or us as customers? And what might a return culture look like that respects both people’s need for flexibility and the planet’s very finite capacity for waste?
Return season isn’t going away. But the version of it we live with is still very much a design choice.
