- 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.