The papers and books worth reading next, and what to take from each.
Can Product Returns Make You Money?J. Andrew Petersen and V. Kumar, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2010The practitioner version of their research: why returns raise profit up to a point, and how to manage for it. Start here.
Return Shipping Policies of Online RetailersAmanda Bower and James Maxham, Journal of Marketing, 2012What happened to spending after fee returns and free returns, and why regret over paying for a return mattered most.
The Effect of Return Policy Leniency on Consumer Purchase and Return DecisionsNarayan Janakiraman, Holly Syrdal and Ryan Freling, Journal of Retailing, 2016The five dimensions of a policy, and which ones sell versus which ones bring things back.
The Option Value of ReturnsEric Anderson, Karsten Hansen and Duncan Simester, Marketing Science, 2009How to think of a return policy as insurance with a price, and why its value differs by customer and category.
The Customer Consequences of Returns in Online RetailingStanley Griffis, Shashank Rao, Thomas Goldsby and Tarikere Niranjan, Journal of Operations Management, 2012The operations view: returns processing, and refund speed in particular, as a driver of the next purchase.
Delivering HappinessTony Hsieh, 2010Zappos’s longtime chief executive on building a company around service. Read it for the idea that the unglamorous parts of the experience are the brand.
And the research: Petersen and Kumar (2009, 2015); Minnema and colleagues (2016) on reviews and returns; Shehu, Papies and Neslin (2020) on free shipping; Torkaman and colleagues (2026) on exchanges. Full references are in Appendix C.