Amazon refunds in two days. Other big retailers take up to twelve. The gap is usually the warehouse.
Which?'s mystery-shopping investigation found major UK retailers breaking refund law. The pattern behind it isn't dishonesty, it's a returns process that was never checked after go-live.
Which? published a mystery-shopping investigation yesterday morning that should make every UK eCommerce director wince. Twelve shoppers, seventeen of the country’s biggest online retailers, more than 200 items, all sent back via the Post Office.
The questions they were looking to answer were simple ones: do you get the correct amount refunded? How long does it take? Are you operating within your own returns policy and the legal frameworks for consumer rights that govern you?
The headline is that several household names are breaking the law.
- River Island and Sports Direct failed to refund the original delivery fee.
- Matalan refunded the product to only seven shoppers out of twelve.
- Without the delivery fee, a £3.99 item with a £3.00 delivery charge and a £2.99 return charge left shoppers £9.98 out of pocket.
- Pets at Home refunded only the goods value, and only on half of the parcels.
- Boots UK, Halfords, House of Fraser and Superdrug all failed to return delivery fees in most or all cases.
The law here isn’t complicated. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, if a customer cancels an online order within the 14-day window, they’re entitled to get back the cost of the goods, plus the standard outbound delivery charge. You can make the consumer pay for the return postage, and you can decline to refund the premium they paid for next-day delivery. What you cannot do is keep the basic delivery fee, and you certainly cannot keep the value of the product if it’s returned in good condition, unused.
The gap between the policy and the practice
What struck me reading the full report wasn’t the law-breaking. It was the gap between what retailers wrote in their T&Cs and what they did in the real world.
Sports Direct and House of Fraser scored 100% on Which?’s analysis of their terms and conditions. Their policies are, on paper, exemplary. In practice, they repeatedly failed to return delivery fees.
ASOS and Holland & Barrett had scrappy returns policies but got the money back to consumers reliably and in the correct amounts.
Next appears to have refunded the £2.50 “return fee” and kept the £4.95 “delivery charge”, which is precisely arse-backwards and suggests a rule configured the wrong way around somewhere in their returns tech stack.
That’s a platform/tech-stack problem that can turn into a legal problem. A refund is the end of the chain and the end of the CX journey: carrier scan, warehouse receipt, quality check, WMS update, order management system update, payment gateway processing. Every handoff is a place for the delivery fee to quietly fall off the calculation, or for a returned parcel to sit unbooked for a fortnight.
Which? found refund times ranging from two days at Currys to twelve days at Superdrug and Pets at Home. Ten days of difference isn’t a policy choice. It’s a warehouse processing bottleneck.
Why this matters if you use a 3PL partner
If your fulfilment is outsourced to a 3PL, your returns process is shared with a partner who may not think about consumer law at all. Their job is to receive the parcel, grade it, and put it back into stock if the item is good for resale. Whether the refund includes outbound postage is decided by the configuration between your tech stack and the warehouse’s WMS, often never looked at again after go-live, when everything “appears” to be working.
Questions worth asking this week:
- When a return is receipted at the warehouse, what event triggers the refund?
- How long does the process take, end to end?
- Does your refund logic explicitly include standard outbound delivery?
- Is your returns portal covering the whole process, or does it hand the customer off to a live chat that isn’t aligned to your actual returns policy?
If nobody can answer these easily, you may have a problem brewing. Pull five to ten recent returns and check the actual amounts credited.
The other lessons from this mystery shop
Amazon and John Lewis both scored 98%: free returns, correct refunds, clear terms that matched reality, and customers kept informed at every stage. John Lewis is now the first Which? Recommended Provider for returns. Never knowingly under… refunded? Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
One shopper said they’d received an Amazon order, returned it, and been refunded before other retailers had even dispatched the rest of their items.
That’s a competitive advantage built entirely on warehouse processing speed, outbound and reverse logistics. Nobody puts “we refund the delivery fee in full along with the proper value of the goods” in a Black Friday ad. But the retailers at the bottom of this table will spend the next fortnight explaining themselves to journalists, and the ones at the top will spend it taking a bit of their market share from savvy consumers.
Returns are not a cost centre to be minimised
They’re the last interaction a customer has with your brand before deciding whether to come back. Worth getting right, and worth checking whether your 3PL and your systems are actually doing what your returns policy says. If not, get it sorted before the problems escalate through Peak.
Sell more, profitably (and legally).
SHIPMAX
