For Holiday Returns, Walmart.com Has an Advantage over Amazon

As December turns into January and the holiday shopping season makes way for the holiday gift-giving season, our thoughts turn to … returning stuff.

We’ve long tracked return patterns at Amazon.com, and how customers actually handle those returns. Providing the necessary means to return purchases is a well-known logistic and economic challenge for all retailers, especially online retailers, and certainly for the biggest online retailer of them all.

Amazon has faced the challenge by allowing customers to return goods at a variety of locations: Amazon stores (including Whole Foods), pick-up and locker locations; affiliates such as Kohl’s; and drop off at US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx locations; in addition to pick-ups at the delivery location.

We can compare Amazon return patterns to those of Walmart.com customers. Note, for Walmart this includes only customers with recent purchases on Walmart.com, not in-store at a Walmart store. This comparison reveals some of the interesting contrasts between an e-commerce pioneer with few stores and a retail giant with over 5,000 US stores and a smaller but growing e-commerce presence.

Overall, slightly more Walmart.com customers (63%) have experience with processing a return than Amazon (58%). For both, among those who made a return, about one-third returned a purchase in the past three months, with another third returning one in the past year, and one third last returning a purchase over a year ago (Chart 1).