Westfield wants you to go to the mall to get your e-commerce refunds
By Annlee Ellingson | Oct 26, 2016
Westfield wants consumers to return the stuff they bought online at the mall.
The shopping-center company has partnered with Happy Returns to pilot just such a service at two of its properties in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The move comes after the Venice, California startup’s participation in the three-month R/GA Connected Commerce Accelerator in partnership with Westfield Labs. The program culminated this morning with a demo day at the Bespoke co-working/demo/event space at Westfield San Francisco.
At the demo, Happy Returns announced that it has set up Return Bars at Westfield Topanga and Westfield San Francisco. The San Francisco desk opened on Sept. 15, with the Topanga desk following on Oct. 5.
These are the second and third locations for the company, which launched this year. The first site is at Santa Monica Place in Santa Monica, California.
Happy Returns is a technology, logistics and service company that enables customers who shop online to make in-person returns and get immediate refunds, eliminating the hassle and delays of returning items by mail.
Co-founders David Sobie and Mark Geller came up with the idea after working together at HauteLook, a flash sale retailer that was acquired by Nordstrom in 2011. The pair launched “Return to Rack,” a program that enabled HauteLook shoppers to return online purchases to physical Nordstrom Rack stores.
Within six months, more than 70 percent of HauteLook’s online returns were being made at Rack stores, generating more than a million incremental store visits during the first year of the program.
Other omni-channel retailers have reported similar results with their shop-online-return-in-store programs, with Nordstrom stating that more than 60 percent of returns from its full-price Nordstrom.com site are returned to brick and mortars, a Westfield spokesperson told me via email. Macy’s cites rates of more than 80 percent, and Target and Walmart cite more than 90 percent.
Happy Returns confirmed these findings in a shopper survey of online shoppers, 68 percent of whom “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement, “When given a choice, I prefer to return in person.”
“By working with Westfield to offer the Happy Returns service through the Westfield Guest Services team in San Francisco and Topanga, we have an amazing opportunity to validate the customer demand for returning online purchases in the way they prefer — in person — in some of the top shopping centers in America,” Sobie said in a statement.
So far Happy Returns is working with the online fashion marketplace Tradesy. The startup will begin accepting returns from several other as-yet-unannounced retailers before the end of the year.
The company makes money by charging retailers a per-item fee that includes the Happy Returns service plus the price to disposition and ship the returned items. Because the company aggregates returns before shipping, the price per item is less than the cost of shipping returns individually.
Happy Returns also generates revenue by liquidating merchandise that retailers don’t want back and offering a turnkey returns solution that includes also processing online returns by mail.
Meanwhile, Westfield is “always looking for compelling ways to bring shoppers into our centers,” a spokesperson said. “The Happy Returns service helps online retailers have a physical presence, gives our visitors more options when it comes to their shopping activities (like returns), and drives more foot traffic for our centers — that is a win for everyone across the board.”
Happy Returns has raised $2 million from the R/GA accelerator and a seed round led by Lowercase Capital.
Write to Annlee Ellingson at annleeellingson@bizjournals.com
Article was originally published here.
