Reducing Returns in E-Commerce -- The Potential of Self-Benefits and Social Norms to Reduce Product Returns and Increase Customer Value

The increasing use of the internet as a shopping channel generates a higher number of product returns incurring high costs for retailers. Although returns being part of the business model of many online-retailers can also affect future sales positively, current levels of customers´ return behavior oppress retailer´s profitability by exploiting their lenient return policies. Restricting measures of retailers have turned out to be contraproductive in changing return behavior of demanding customers. Thus, retailers seek marketing instruments making it possible to reduce return behavior without alienating customers and damaging sales. Marketing research to date has rather focused on the effects and usefulness of increasing return rates but lacks in examining ways to change product return behavior. Psychological research states that people's behavior is largely influenced by the behavior of those people around them and that consumers are more likely to engage in a behavior, if they can derive a self-benefit from that behavior. Self-benefit and normative appeals have proved to be effective in changing various behaviors. However, little is known about their effects on customers´ return behavior.
Additionally, depending on the return motive these appeals may differ in their efficacy before or after a purchase, which has also not been examined in marketing research. But a reduction in product returns can also mean a drop in sales. Thus, it requires not only a better understanding about the effects of normative and self-benefit appeals on return behavior but also on purchase behavior in the short- and long-term to create knowledge of the trade-off between reducing returns and maintaining sales to increase customer value to the retailer.