Product-Oriented Web Technologies and Product Returns: An Exploratory Study

Internet retailers have been making significant investments in Web technologies, such as zoom, alternative photos, and color swatch, that are capable of providing detailed product-oriented information and, thereby, mitigating the lack of “touch and feel,” which, in turn, is expected to lower product returns. However, a clear understanding of the relationship between these technologies and product returns is still lacking. Our study attempts to fill this gap by using several econometric models to explore the said relationship. Our unique and rich data set from a women's clothing company allows us to measure technology usage at the product level for each consumer. The results show that, in this context, zoom usage has a negative coefficient, suggesting that a higher use of the zoom technology is associated with fewer returns. Interestingly, we find that a higher use of alternative photos is associated with more returns and, perhaps more importantly, with lower net sales. Color swatch, on the other hand, does not seem to have any effect on returns. Thus, our findings show that different technologies have different effects on product returns. We provide explanations for these findings based on the extant literature. We also conduct a number of tests to ensure the robustness of the results.