Fashion Retailers Search For Fixes For The Post-Holiday Return Season

With the holiday sale season in full gear, fashion retailers are already steeling themselves against the nightmare of the returns to come. This year, online orders have already reached dizzying new heights. Consumers recorded $7.4 billion in online sales on Black Friday, a 19.6% year-over-year increase, according to Adobe Digital Insights. But thanks to the combination of retailers’ aggressive discounting and consumer worries about sustainability and recession, this may be a year of epic buyer’s remorse. Returns may be just as record-setting as Black Friday sales. UPS said it expects to process 1.6 million returns per day in the week before Christmas, and nearly 2 million on January 2, a 26% increase from last year. Returns are not a new story, but the crosscurrents are especially strong this year. It takes just seconds for a consumer to make an impulse purchase: a click through on social media, a shout out to Alexa. (Even before Black Friday’s kick off, online sales were already humming, driven by pre-Black Friday discounting.) This year, the regret-and-return cycle will churn faster too. Read more at Fortune.