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Customer loyalty and accurate product information

What published surveys show about returns, product content and repeat buying, and the loyalty figures a shop can track for itself.

By CharpstAR · 25 Sept 2023 · Updated 10 Oct 2026

SEP2023

Most published figures on product information and repeat buying come from studies of returns.

How often online orders come back

Retailers surveyed by NRF and Happy Returns estimated that 15.8 percent of their 2025 sales would be returned, 849.9 billion dollars across US retail, and 19.3 percent of online sales. ICSC's analysis of 848.1 billion dollars of 2022 spending at 69 retailers put the online return rate at 15.2 percent and the in-store rate at 5 percent. NRF's figure is retailers' estimate for 2025; ICSC's comes from 2022 spending.

Why online orders come back

When ICSC asked 1,012 US consumers in February 2024 why they had returned online purchases, the most common answers were a damaged item (52 percent), an item that didn't fit (50 percent), an item that wasn't as expected (42 percent) and the wrong item being sent (37 percent).

Syndigo's 2025 survey of more than 8,500 shoppers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Brazil and Mexico asked about product content directly. Of those shoppers, 21 percent had returned a product because it didn't meet the expectations its product content had set, and in the US the figure was 31 percent. Three in four said incomplete or inaccurate product information gave them a negative opinion of the brand, up from 73 percent in 2024 and 62 percent in 2023.

Returns and the next order

J. Andrew Petersen and V. Kumar studied how product returns affect what customers buy afterwards, in a 2009 paper in the Journal of Marketing, and concluded that returns are unavoidable and not in themselves bad for the business.

The return experience is another matter. NRF and Happy Returns surveyed 2,006 people who had returned an online purchase in the previous 12 months, and 71 percent said they were less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor returns experience, up from 67 percent the year before. Four in five said they would tell friends and family about it.

What the product page can change

Of the reasons in ICSC's survey, fit and expectation are the two a product page can influence. A correctly scaled 3D model lets the shopper look at the back and the underside, read the dimension lines drawn on the product and, on a phone, place it in their own room at true size.

Shopify reports that Gunner Kennels, whose shoppers can place a life-size dog crate next to their pet in AR before buying, reduced its return rate by 5 percent.

An accurate product page also names the material, gives dimensions in the customer's units, shows the colour under neutral light, lists what's in the box and gives specific delivery information.

Figures a shop can track itself

None of these surveys followed a change to a product page through to repeat orders, which a shop can do with figures it already collects.

Figure	How to get it	What it shows
Return rate by product	Returns divided by orders, per product, each month	Whether returns fall on the products you changed
Return reasons	Tag each return as size, colour, quality, damage or changed mind	How many returns come from a wrong expectation
Repeat purchase rate at 90 and 180 days	Share of customers who order again in that window	The loyalty figure itself, which moves slowly
What returning customers buy next	The category of a customer's second order	Whether they buy outside the category they started in
Customer service contacts per order	Tickets divided by orders, per product	Questions the product page left open
Reviews that mention size or colour	Share of reviews with those words	Expectation problems before they reach the return rate

Return reasons and service contacts per order change within weeks of a change to the page. Repeat purchase rate takes months to move, so record it before the change to have something to compare against.