Consumers remain sensitive to any efforts from retailers to make return policies more stringent.
That’s according to data from Blue Yonder, which shows that 66 percent of global consumers said they may hesitate to make a purchase because of tighter return restrictions. That figure is a bit lower in the U.S., where 59 percent of consumers said the same.
Globally, millennials and Gen Zers said they were more likely to skip out on a purchase because of tighter return policies, with 74 percent and 71 percent of respondents, respectively, saying as much.
Related Stories
Tim Robinson, senior vice president, commerce and returns at Blue Yonder, said retailers could lose out on consumer market share if they choose to enforce more stringent returns strategies.
“Consumers continue to vote with their behavior. Those retailers that have introduced prices or charging are losing customer sentiment and support and loyalty…and therefore, we haven’t seen an acceleration from retailers of those types of moves,” Robinson said. “Don’t use changing consumer behavior as the savior of your economics; use supply chain management, inventory management as the savior of your economics.”
Those that have refrained from tightening their return policy could be counted wise by consumers. Blue Yonder’s data further shows that 84 percent of respondents globally said that, if they learned their favorite retailers implemented harsher returns policies, they would stop shopping with those companies.
More than one-third of U.S. respondents said they would not return an item if a retailer required a fee for the return. The remaining 64 percent of U.S. respondents, who said they would pay a fee, only felt comfortable paying $1 to $5 for returns.
Of the proportion of consumers keeping items, fewer are doing it at the discretion of a retailer than this time last year. Blue Yonder’s 2024 survey showed that 72 percent of consumers said they had been told to keep an item rather than returning it; in 2025, that figure dropped 12 percentage points to 60 percent globally. In the U.S. 55 percent of consumers were told to keep an item instead of returning it.
Robinson said the decline in retailers’ use of “keep it” policies is a win. He noted that it likely leads to less consumer waste ending up in landfills and that it allows retailers to reap some profit for the items consumers return, particularly through the continued rise of branded resale.
“Recommerce is becoming like a bigger part of retail—not just consumer selling to consumer, but items coming back [to retailers] and then being sold into recommerce channels. I feel like as every month goes by, there are more opportunities for the owners of inventory to be able to make sensible decisions that do generate some value for those items, and therefore, what felt to me like an almost kind of desperate use of a policy is no longer seen as the sort of silver bullet to these to these solutions,” Robinson said.
For environmentally conscious consumers, that retailers are backing off keep it policies could be a boon. Globally, nearly two-thirds of consumers said they are at least somewhat worried about the environmental repercussions associated with returns, up 10 percentage points from 2024.
Robinson said consumers continue to change their habits, and noted that sustainability has, in many ways, become a more widely considered and discussed issue among consumers.
“I think consumers are just becoming trained to be more aware about the provenance of what they buy, what it’s made of, its impact,” Robinson said.
As brands and retailers continue to evolve their returns strategies, Robinson said they should consider consumers’ growing interest in environmental concerns; transparency, he said, could help retain consumers and pique their interests.
“If you think about consumers in the future, what could be a great move from a retailer perspective is providing consumers with real visibility about what happens to their returns,” he said. “Imagine somebody bought a top, and they go to return it. We could highlight that, of the last 100 items that have been returned, 40 have been sold at full value, 30 have been sold through liquidation [and so on]. Providing consumers with that visibility about the impact of the decisions they make feels like it could…actually have the impact of changing behavior.”
