Investigating returns management across e-commerce sectors and countries : trends, perspectives, and future research

Background: The systematic literature review with additional descriptive analysis at hand focuses on analysing returns management in e-commerce, which is an increasingly critical issue as the volume of online shopping is rising. Methods: Drawing from a comprehensive search of academic databases and a manual review of Google Scholar, 54 articles dating from 2007 onwards were collected and fully read. Results: The review reveals a main research effort emerging mainly from Germany and other countries, with a notable focus on fashion retail. The bulk of these studies aim to understand and reduce the frequency of customer returns, addressing a substantial operational challenge for online retailers. The findings provide multiple research streams extracted from the collected literature and combined to an overview. Conclusions: Through this, there are tendencies which can be interpreted to derive the evolution of the research field. The illustrated results in this review paint a detailed picture of the existing research landscape. This highlights the importance of ongoing research, which, e.g., holds potential benefits for customer satisfaction and environmental sustainability. The review also lists future research directions, recommending the continued investigation of areas such as predictive analytics and customer behaviour to further refine returns management practices.