After the holiday season of 2025-2026, the global e-commerce return problem has further intensified. Industry data shows that the overall online order return rate has exceeded 10%, and during the critical period after the festival in early January 2026, the return rate once reached 12.2%, a year-on-year increase of about 3 percentage points.

At the monetary level, during the holiday season from November to December 2025, the scale of global e-commerce returns exceeded $181 billion, accounting for 14% of the total online consumption during the same period. Among them, the proportion of abnormal returns has significantly increased, with fraudulent and abusive returns accounting for 12%, including behaviors such as empty packages, package swapping, and counterfeit replacement, becoming an important source of loss for sellers.

In the face of pressure, platforms and logistics links have begun to take simultaneous actions. For example, the German e-commerce platform Otto has taken measures to ban users with high return rates, controlling abuse risks from the user side; logistics companies identify abnormal return paths through AI technology; sellers focus more on aspects such as product display, size guidance, and localized return processing to reduce operational losses.

The industry believes that the return problem is no longer just an operational difficulty for individual sellers, but a systematic challenge that requires collaborative solutions of platform rules, technical means, and seller operational strategies.

Source: NetEase Business