The unseen cost: Combating the $103 billion omnichannel abusive returns and refunds

Abusive returns and refunds cost billions. Discover how to identify bad actors, learn how these sophisticated schemes, operating across every retail channel, are eroding merchant profitability, and how merchants can fight back.

Understand and counter abusive return schemes

Abusive returns and refunds have become a critical, omnichannel challenge for retailers, impacting profits and customer relationships. This problem, now three times the scale of payment fraud, stems from liberal policies designed for customer delight, which bad actors exploit through organized “return-as-a-service” operations. Retailers face a dilemma: tighten policies and risk customer backlash, or absorb massive losses. The key lies in understanding different consumer behaviors and applying nuanced strategies to protect profit while ensuring seamless experiences for loyal customers across all sales channels.

Jeff Otto
Jeff Otto

CMO, Riskified

There’s this tension that we’re always feeling, which is how do we do no harm? How do we do right by the good customers that we need to delight, that we need to provide a great customer experience… And how do we balance that against the unethical growing and sophisticated set of bad actors that are out there looking for any weakness in our policies, any weakness in our defenses to steal from us?