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Order Returns

25 design examples manually annotated by Baymard researchers

What’s this? Here you’ll find 25 annotated “Order Returns” design examples from Baymard’s UX benchmark of 60 major e-commerce sites. (Note: this is less than 1% of the full research catalog.)

Our quantitative research reveal that 29% of e-commerce users who access their e-commerce account, do so to initiate, manage, or complete a return. Furthermore, we’ve found that 53% of users returned at least one item in the past year to an e-commerce site, and we found that 11% of users have abandoned at least one purchase in the past quarter solely due to an unsatisfactory returns policy. Despite the importance of returns, during our large-scale usability testing of the returns processes at e-commerce sites, we’ve found this to be the single Self-Service and Accounts related feature that generate the most frustrations and usability issues for users.

More ‘Order Returns’ Insights

Our quantitative study of 1,103 US adults finds that 4.98% would never purchase from a particular e-commerce site again, while 7.56% would be unlikely to do so — solely due to a negative return experience.
Our testing reveal a long array of potential pitfalls in the online returns experience, such as initiating the return on the e-commerce site, moving through the return flow, printing the shipping label, returns costs, returns shipping methods, in-store returns, and communicating the status of an ongoing return. Unfortunately our testing also revealed that while a pre-printed return label in the original package is greatly appreciated by some users it doesn’t replace having an online returns flow.

Learn More: Besides exploring the 25 “Order Returns” design examples below, you may also want to read our related articles on “Have a ‘Cancellation Requested’ Order State” and “New Research Findings on ‘Accounts & Self-Service’ UX”.

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