An industry survey priced 2023's returns at $743 billion

The signal

In consumer & society and retail economics, the cost of a returned purchase is usually invisible to the shopper who sends it back. The National Retail Federation's 2023 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry report, published 22 December 2023, states that US retailers absorbed $743 billion in merchandise returns in 2023, equal to 14.5% of retail sales, or, as the report puts it, $145 million in returns for every $1 billion in sales. The report states online purchases were returned at a 17.6% rate, worth $247 billion, against a 10.02% return rate for purchases made in a physical store, worth $371 billion.

The evidence

This is a trade-industry monitor, not a government statistical series: NRF states the figures come from pairing its own member survey responses with transaction data supplied by Appriss Retail, whose client base the data partner's own account describes as including 60 of the top 100 US retailers. Both documents state plainly that the underlying method changed for 2023, and that 2023 numbers cannot be compared to the 2022 returns report as a result. That warning is itself informative: a vendor-industry estimate built from a shifting sample of retail clients is a measure of the retailers Appriss Retail happens to serve in a given year, weighted and combined with survey data, rather than a fixed, unchanging panel tracked identically year over year the way an official statistical series aims to be.

Timeframe and confidence

The two accounts, from NRF and from its data partner, agree on every figure quoted, which supports confidence that both are describing the same underlying study rather than diverging estimates. This is an editorial reading: agreement between a report and its own co-author is expected corroboration, not independent replication, and the report's own comparability warning means the $743 billion figure should be read as a 2023-specific estimate under 2023's method, not as one point in an unbroken trend line back to earlier years' reports.

What would change the reading

A later NRF-Appriss report using a consistent method across two or more years would let a genuine year-on-year trend be read for the first time since the 2023 methodology change. An independent, differently sourced estimate of retail returns arriving at a similar order of magnitude would strengthen confidence in the scale of the figure without relying on the same vendor's data twice.

• Will NRF and Appriss Retail hold the same method steady long enough to publish a comparable multi-year trend?
• How much of the online-versus-store return-rate gap reflects fit-and-see shopping behaviour rather than fraud or abuse?
• What would the same $743 billion look like as a share of online sales alone, rather than of all retail sales?

The report is best read as exactly what it labels itself: an industry monitor built jointly by a trade association and a retail-data vendor, informative on scale but explicitly not comparable, by its own account, to the year before it.

Source trail

1. 2023 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industrynrf.com · Source publication: 2023-12-22 · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   States total 2023 US merchandise returns of $743 billion, 14.5% of retail sales, with a 17.6% online return rate and a 10.02% in-store return rate, and that a change in methodology makes 2023 figures not comparable to the 2022 report.

2. NRF and Appriss Retail Report $743 Billion in Merchandise Returned in 2023apprissretail.com · Source publication: 2023-12-26 · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   Corroborates the same figures from the data partner's side and states Appriss Retail's client base of 60 of the top 100 US retailers as the transaction-data source paired with NRF's survey.

Read across the evidence

• A pandemic e-commerce jump partly reverted within one quarter
• Amazon's own filings show its warehouse footprint nearly doubling
• US de minimis shipments passed a billion a year before a crackdown

Markets & measurement · All 100 historical records