Here’s a strange pattern Tom Wagener has noticed across dozens of enterprise accounts: the companies saving the most money on returns are the ones who refuse to share the numbers.
That silence tells a story the market isn’t hearing loudly enough.
The conversation nobody’s having
The eCommerce industry has a fixation. Acquisition, conversion, brand experience, marketing spend, and revenue growth. But returns? Merely the unwanted stepchild logistics handles.
But the financial reality is far less tidy. A return is not just a lost sale – it’s compounding cost. As Tom Wagener, our Product Owner of Returns, puts it:
Lost revenue, outbound shipping wasted, handling cost on the return, and potential write-off. And that’s before a single customer service agent picks up the phone.
Germany has the highest return rates in the world. A legacy of catalog-era consumer behavior where ordering large quantities and sending 80% back was perfectly normal. A large global retailer that parcelLab works with reportedly hit 40% or higher at peak periods. U.S. rates are structurally lower, but still growing. The problem is global, and it’s getting more expensive.
It’s no longer a secret: Most retailers in fashion already have a returns portal. However, what many people miss is that having a portal is not the same as having a strategy. The majority treat it as a box to check: install, configure, and move on. Meanwhile, customer service teams are drowning in avoidable calls, ranging from €5–8 per contact. Product teams are receiving returns data with a six-month lag. Warehouse workers are manually typing in order numbers. The portal exists. You may have implemented strategies to lower your return rates, but the problems persist.
Meet Tom Wagener
Tom Wagener is our Product Owner for Returns at parcelLab and has been at the company for nearly six years. During that time, he built the returns product from scratch, starting with the very first customers. Before parcelLab, he worked at Narvar and brings extensive SaaS and customer project experience to the table.
Tom has been in the room for enterprise returns deployments with Bestseller, Dyson, Conrad, Emma Mattress, and others, across Germany, Poland, the U.S., and beyond. His perspective is rare: simultaneously product-native and commercially sharp, with zero incentive to oversimplify. His core argument is uncomfortable for the industry: the market under-indexes cost reduction through returns because vendors – including parcelLab – historically led with CX and brand experience. The savings story, as Tom admits, “fell through the cracks.”
Today, he believes it’s in fact the bigger story.
The label-as-finish-line fallacy
There are three ways retailers handle returns today.
Option 1: customer service does it manually – roughly € 5–8 per call, often a terrible customer experience.
Option 2: a label in the box – roughly eight to 12 cents per shipment (not per return), plus the logistical overhead of printers, timing, and warehouse synchronization.
Option 3: a returns portal.
Switching from label-in-box to a basic portal already delivers a strong ROI. You stop paying per shipment and drastically reduce call volume. Many leaders stop right there, but the returns journey only begins here. Tom describes the status quo many retailers are stuck in:
A basic portal that generates labels is commodity-level. It doesn’t solve business problems. It only digitizes label dispensing. No granular data on return reasons, policy enforcement, segmentation, integration with customer service or CRM, or routing logic for edge cases. Every unsolved problem remains a recurring cost.
But the mysterious companies that refuse to share their savings numbers? They didn’t stop after implementing a basic portal. They’re the ones who kept going.
Returns as a business platform – three pillars of the mindset shift
The companies winning at returns share three conceptual commitments that set them apart. None of them are about technology. All of them are about how you think.
It’s not a project – it’s a product
Most companies approach returns with a project-management mindset: Define scope, implement, and close the ticket. Tom applies a different logic. He thinks from a perspective of product development, meaning you never ship a final version. Instead, you instrument, identify friction, and iterate.
The environment around returns never stands still. Customer expectations shift, carrier landscapes evolve, and EU right-of-withdrawal legislation creates new compliance requirements. Fraud patterns grow more sophisticated. As a result, a static portal doesn’t stay “good enough” – it degrades over time.
Take this large global fashion retailer as an example: Their claims portal – the “I didn’t get my parcel” flow – was added to the returns portal after the initial deployment. It wasn’t in the original scope, but it managed to eliminate multi-step customer service interactions and enabled automated carrier disputes. That only happened because the team treated the portal as a living product, not a completed project.
Each optimization – smarter return reasons, routing rules, approval workflows – builds on the last. The value compounds. Companies that “set and forget” leave that compounding on the table every single month.
It’s not a returns portal – it’s a post-purchase customer service gateway
Here’s the mental model that limits most retailers: returns portal equals convenience returns. Customers are sending back a shirt that doesn’t fit. End of story.
Tom reframes the entire category:
The returns portal should be the single intelligent gateway for everything that goes wrong after delivery: Warranty claims, missing parcels, damaged goods, product complaints, and even diagnostic troubleshooting.
This reframe changes everything downstream. It changes which stakeholders you involve: not just logistics, but also customer service, product, fraud, and CRM. It also changes which KPIs you track: not just return rate, but cost per contact, resolution time, and product improvement velocity. Additionally, it changes which use cases you build for.
Don’t digitize your old process – rethink it
The default instinct is strong: replicate the physical-world return process in digital form. Paper return slip becomes a digital form, including the same single-level return reason and the same one-size-fits-all flow.
What’s lost in copy-paste mode is the data richness that digital enables. “Too small” on a paper form tells you nothing. “Too small – in what way? Too short? Too tight? Wrong cut?” on a digital portal feeds directly into product optimization, sizing guide improvements, and potentially design changes.
Consider this: Tom reports that at the same retailer mentioned earlier, returns data was taking half a year to reach product teams. That means corrective action on product descriptions or sizing guides lagged by two full collection cycles. A rethought digital flow could deliver that data in real time.
The principle is simple but hard to practice: don’t ask “how do we do this today?” Ask “What problem are we actually trying to solve?” Tom encounters this constantly in his work. Customers request a specific button or feature. When he asks what problem they’re solving, it often turns out that the button wouldn’t have solved it in the first place.
Strategic principles for enterprise eCommerce & CX leaders
Beyond the three pillars, Tom names a set of operating principles that hold true across company sizes, categories, and geographies.
Assign a single owner with a cross-functional mandate
Without ownership, every department optimizes locally. Logistics cares about warehouse throughput. Customer service cares about call volume. Product cares about data. Nobody builds the system. The owner doesn’t need to come from a specific department. Tom says it can be logistics, CX, or eCommerce. What matters most is that they have the mandate, the leverage, and the willingness to push across silos. Global enterprise retailers have dedicated returns owners, but many mid-market retailers with 30%+ return rates do not. That gap is where the compounding value disappears.
Don’t treat every customer the same
A loyal, high-value customer claiming a missing parcel should not jump through the same hoops as a first-time buyer with a flagged risk profile. That trust, at scale, is what a platform with CRM integration enables:
Faster refunds for loyalty members
No return fees
Gift card top-ups for choosing store credit over a cash refund
Automatic claim approval based on customer traffic-light scores
These aren’t “nice to haves” – they’re retention levers that only work on a real platform and allow effective customer segmentation.
Accept that returns will never go away, then make the most of them
Customer acquisition costs are high enough that losing a customer over a bad return experience is one of the most expensive things a retailer can do. And here’s the counterintuitive truth: better CX and lower cost are not in tension. A self-service portal that provides proactive communication, clear instructions, drop-off maps, and pickup address changes costs less to operate than a manual process.
A well-rounded returns platform wins
Most retailers are still operating with a label-dispensing mindset. The leaders – the ones whose savings numbers they won’t share –are leveraging a full-service returns management platform. They treat returns as a product, staff it with an owner, and iterate continuously.
Returns will never disappear. They’ll never be fun. But the retailers who accept that and build accordingly are the ones turning an operational headache into a quiet competitive edge.
The label was just the beginning. What you build on top of it is what separates you from everyone else who stopped there.
Your questions, answered
Returns touch every department from logistics to customer service to product management. A platform approach treats the returns portal as a continuously evolving system that solves operational pain points, reduces cost, and improves CX – not just a label generator.
The cost of returns is not just return shipping. You lose the original revenue, the outbound shipping cost, the handling cost of processing the return, and potentially the product value itself if it can’t be resold. Every customer service call adds € 5–8 on top.
A well-configured returns portal lets customers self-serve for label generation, warranty claims, and missing-parcel reports – eliminating repetitive contacts. One enterprise example reduced three touchpoints per warranty case to one, saving roughly € 16 per case at scale.
A portal generates labels. A platform enforces return policies, routes items to the right warehouse, segments customers for differentiated treatment, auto-approves low-risk claims, and absorbs new use cases like warranty, fraud, and missing parcels – all without a rebuild.
Return fees can reduce volume, but they’re not the primary lever. Policy enforcement through a digital portal – blocking non-returnable items, enforcing time windows – is often more effective and less damaging to customer loyalty than blanket fees.
