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With retail eCommerce revenue projected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2025, eCommerce fulfillment operations have been struggling to keep up with higher than estimated growth. The COVID-19 pandemic fueled more online shopping, illustrating for many consumers the benefits of being able to order items online with a few simple clicks.

Returns policies and the handling of returns are vital concerns for online retailers. No business likes to sell something and have it come back from the consumer. The cost of processing returns in terms of resources and staffing can be significant. But how you handle eCommerce returns can impact your overall business results.

Here is why you should make your returns process a priority and some best practices for handling internet returns.

If your business sells, handles, or stores products, its success depends largely on the quality of its inventory management system. It’s not a sexy topic. But it sure is important. Unfortunately, when it comes time to spend capital on innovations that will boost business results, automated inventory management systems are often overlooked.

Every year many of us in the industry share our stories of “Peak Season” that are almost always what now seems to be a relatively innocuous set of challenges revolving around ramping up staff, adding more temporary workstations or bringing in some rental equipment and devices while being extra vigilant to monitor shipping volumes and timing.

2020 accelerated “Ecommerce sales” far beyond what anyone had imagined before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Ecommerce going from about 12-14% of retails sales to anywhere between 18-25% of all retail sales. While it can be safely assumed that there will be a resumption of foot traffic to retails stores, malls, restaurants and others once the pandemic fully subsides, it is clear that the purchase habits of a large percentage of the population have been permanently altered. How much has changed and how your operations should be positioned to optimize it after what has been a year of just keeping up is worth exploring.

Among many of the challenges that 2020 forced so many businesses to solve was how to not just create a direct-to-customer fulfillment operation but to optimize it and standardize the processes enough to make it seem like less of the scramble that it was when all of this started almost a year ago. One specific process that was a common challenge for many businesses in 2020 was the Picking Process.

With the disruptions in supply chains all over the world making headlines in mainstream news channels, it’s a good time to revisit some basics on Supply Chain Planning (SPC) given that we now see a lot of businesses being forced to devote a lot more attention to this critical skill area than they may have before – because they did not have to.

As we have learned from managing the Ecommerce boom in 2020, the adrenalin of ramping up adequately to get hundreds – or thousands – of shipments out every day also has a “hangover” feeling that comes from the Returns process.

How has your business responded to the rapid changes in the distribution and logistics industry this year? Chances are that the rapid evolution of your processes and how you supported them are not just a band-aid for making it through to 2021, but the blueprint for your current and future facilities well beyond this crisis and into the future.

While no one needs to be reminded how much has been changing across our industry in 2020, it’s useful to keep looking into HOW things are evolving and learning about what everyone is doing differently as either a reaction to events, or to get ahead of them more pro-actively.

At Newcastle Systems, the large variety of industries over which we receive orders gives us an interesting vantage point from which we can see how things have evolved quite a bit this year. Today we thought it would be useful to share some of what we have been seeing and what we might expect because of it going into 2021. To be brief – you’ve been incredibly innovative and creative this year.