Page 6 - AeM_November_2021

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Behavioral design can lower the return

rate in online retail

ment', with the goal to clarify whether behavioral psy-
chological interventions can close the gap between
"intention" and "action" and significantly influence the
customer's return behavior.

For this purpose, behavior of users in various online
shops was analyzed and evaluated, based on random-
ized experimental designs. This means, visitors to the
online shops were randomly assigned to a certain con-
tact point (e.g., order confirmation when completing a
purchase) or triggered by a certain action (e.g., when
several sizes of an article are placed in the shopping
cart) a number of stored interventions played out.
I think, we can all agree that returns of goods
bought online have a massive impact on the Examples of such interventions are references to the
carbon footprint of the entire retail industry, behavior of other customers (social norms) or to the
costing companies millions and customers time. personal loss of time caused by a return (loss aver-
Hence, there is no question that a reduction in sion).
returns is in the interest of everyone involved. The reactions to the interventions were then compared
But how can online retailers get their customers with the behavior of customers who had not seen a cor-
to the point to shop in such a way that there are responding message. This procedure ensures that the
fewer returns? measured differences can be traced back to the effect
of the respective intervention without any doubt. In this
In the study "The Psychology of Returns", the e- way it was possible to determine which intervention has
commerce consultancy Elaboratum, together with the a return-reducing effect and how strong it is.
software provider Behamics and the University of St.
Gallen, carried out a field experiment with more than Outcome
100,000 online shoppers, empirically investigated how
behavioral psychological interventions affect the return The results of the study show that interventions based
behavior of customers. on behavioral psychology can lead to significant chang-
es in behavior - without any monetary or restrictive
According to their report, in the Corona year 2020 measures. Across four experiments it became evident
alone, 15.9% of all online orders were sent back to re- that the return rate can be reduced by around 4% with
tailers, which contradicts the rational interests of all the means used in this study. Further conceptual re-
those involved, right? An explanation for this phenome- finement of the interventions, additional behavior pat-
non is the so-called "intention-action gap", describing terns and training of the intervention algorithm, could
that we all want to live more sustainably and contribute increase this value to at least 5% the authors believe.
to reducing the volume of parcels (intention), but at the
moment of decision-making, there is a lack of effective Solutions
impulses to translate one's own good intentions into
concrete “actions.” Considering that around 15% of all goods ordered
online are returned according to the estimates of the
Experiment online shop operators, dealing with this problem be-
comes a major challenge. Digital technologies such as
Finding out whether behavioral psychological interven- AI, Big Data or Virtual Reality are certainly useful to
tions can influence returns behavior was the aim of the enable customers making their purchasing decisions
above mentioned ‘behavioral economic returns experi- more reliably, because shop owners often overlook the

6 November 2021: Neuromarketing & Predictive Analytics