The $850 Billion Question No One's Asking

Your refund is disappearing into an $850 billion blind spot — and you have no idea where it went.

You return something. You wait. The money shows up eventually, or it doesn't, and you forget to follow up. It feels small. It isn't.

Consumers are expected to return nearly $850 billion in merchandise this year, and returns have nearly doubled as a share of retail sales since 2012, from 8.8% to 14.5%. Online orders get sent back even more often than in-store ones: 17.3% come back, versus just 10% for in-store purchases.

That's not a small operational hiccup. It's a massive parallel economy, and retailers are racing to keep up.

Why retailers are suddenly obsessed with this

Every return costs a retailer $20 to $30 to process — covering shipping, inspection, restocking, and the system work behind getting your refund issued. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of returns a year, and it's easy to see why more than half of supply chain executives now call returns their single biggest operational challenge, according to a 2025 McKinsey survey. McKinsey's advice to the industry: treat reverse logistics with the same seriousness as any other core business function, with clear executive ownership.

Why this matters more to you than you'd think

Here's the part that should matter to you, the shopper: this isn't just a backend cost problem. It's becoming a loyalty problem. 68% of US adults say return policy is a factor in deciding where to shop in the first place, and 57% say a bad return experience would stop them from buying from that brand again — no matter how loyal they'd been before.

As Jonathan Briggs, SVP of Sales at ShipMonk, puts it: shoppers don't separate "customer experience" from "operations" — if a return drags on, the brand takes the blame, not the workflow.

In other words: when your refund goes missing, you don't think "reverse logistics issue." You think "this store doesn't have it together."

The twist: refund money doesn't feel like real money

Here's something genuinely surprising. A 2025 study in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making found that people are more likely to spend a refund — especially on something fun rather than practical — than they are to spend the same amount from any other source, because refund money carries less psychological "pain of paying" than regular income does.

The returns economy is only getting bigger, and the companies handling it are scrambling to modernize. But none of that helps you track the one refund that's actually yours. That's the gap Refundly fills — automatically tracking every return so you're never the one left wondering where your money went.

Download Refundly → https://lnkd.in/geaxXcXq 

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Sources: National Retail Federation, McKinsey & Company (2025 Merchant Returns Survey), EMARKETER/FedEx-Morning Consult, Retail Customer Experience (ShipMonk), Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (Wiley, 2025)