Product Return Management for Online Retailers

Abstract

High product return rates and their associated costs pose major challenges to online retailers because product return cost can easily reach 35% or even 50% and cause major costs such as foregone profits and costs for unpacking, checking the product’s condition, repacking, restocking, and issuing the refund to the customer. In many cases, the online retailer also agrees to pay return shipping costs and must deal with products returned in less than mint condition.
This presentation presents the results from three research projects that aim to optimize product return management and shipping fee policies and also focuses on the new consumer rights directive of the EU that aims at strengthening consumer rights by harmonizing product return management policies of online retailers in Europe. It summarizes findings from several empirical studies covering more than 5.9 million product purchases by more than 166,000 customers.

Biography

(University of Frankfurt, Germany)
Bernd Skiera took over the very first chair of electronic commerce at a German University in spring 1999, at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. He is also a director of the E-Finance Lab (www.efinance-lab.com) and was a Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, UCLA, Duke, NYU (all US) Cambridge University (UK), University of Economics & Business Administration in Vienna (Austria), and University of Technology at Sydney (Australia). Before his academic career, he has been a software developer for SAP.
His current research focuses on electronic commerce, online marketing, pricing and customer-based firm valuation. His publications appeared in very prestigious journals such as Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Product Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. Former doctoral students of him are nowadays professors at London Business School (UK), Instituto de Empresa (Spain), Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), Technical University of Darmstadt and University of Münster (all Germany).
He is a co-founder of two companies, Bonpago (a company that focuses on financial supply chain management: www.bonpago.de) and Marini Media (a social media company with a strong focus on the development of technology: www.marini-media.de).
He is an enthusiastic tennis player, loves to ski and used to be a passionate chess player but he certainly enjoys most being among his brainy and beautiful wife and their three wonderful children.
More about Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera
 
To register please send an email to: melanie.winkelmann@klu.org

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