What the Hjort and Lantz 2016 study on fashion returns really says about the way we shop

In 2016, two Swedish researchers ran the numbers on a real online fashion retailer and reached a conclusion the industry has spent a decade trying to ignore. Free, lenient returns policies do not pay off in the long run. The customers who lean on them hardest are the least profitable. The loyal customers who keep what they buy are the ones generating the real value.

Klas Hjort and Björn Lantz, writing in the Journal of Business Research, were the first to test that assumption with real transactional data. They found that returners and free-returns customers generated significantly lower contribution per order than the people who simply bought, kept, and came back. Loyalty made money. The order-three-post-two-back habit did not.

That finding has aged well. Several large retailers are now charging for returns, narrowing windows, or flagging frequent returners. The women who have used returns as a fitting room are the ones most exposed as the model tightens.

What Hjort and Lantz actually studied

The paper is called The impact of returns policies on profitability: A fashion e-commerce case. It was published in the Journal of Business Research in 2016, and it was the first study of its kind to take real transactional data from a Swedish online fashion retailer and analyse, line by line, what happens when a shop offers a generous returns policy.

For shoppers, generous returns feel like a small kindness. Free shipping back. No questions asked. Order three sizes, keep the one that fits. It is the default behaviour for most women buying clothes online, and the industry has spent years teaching us to do exactly that.

Hjort and Lantz wanted to know if the model actually works for anyone in the long run.

What they found

The headline result is the one most often quoted: returns policies that are free of charge do not necessarily benefit retailers in terms of long-term profitability.

But the more interesting findings are underneath that. The researchers separated customers into types. Some people buy and rarely return. Some people return frequently. Some are loyal repeat customers. And the data showed that the customers who take the most advantage of lenient, free-returns policies are also the ones who deliver the lowest profit per order. In other words, the more a returns policy is used as a try-on service, the worse the maths becomes for the people selling the clothes.

At the same time, repeat customers, the ones who came back and bought again, generated significantly higher value over time. Loyalty was profitable. The act of ordering and returning, again and again, was not.

There is a second layer here that the paper points to but rarely gets credit for. The same behaviour that erodes retailer profit is also quietly eroding something for the shopper: time, energy, postage queues, packaging waste, and the small but real disappointment of clothes that never quite fit.

What this means for you

It is tempting to read a study like this and assume it is a business problem. It is not, or at least not only. The pattern Hjort and Lantz mapped is also a description of how a lot of women experience online shopping now.

Think about what a "high return rate" actually looks like in real life. It looks like ordering two sizes because the brand's chart is unreliable. It looks like keeping a tab open with three similar dresses because you do not know which cut will sit right on your hips. It looks like the mental load of remembering to post things back before the window closes. It looks like the slow erosion of the joy that buying a new piece of clothing is supposed to bring.

When a returns policy becomes a substitute for knowing what will fit, the shopper carries more of the cost than the receipt suggests.

The part the paper does not say out loud

Hjort and Lantz wrote about policy. They did not write about why women return so many clothes in the first place. But anyone who has shopped online for more than a few months can name the reasons without thinking: sizing varies wildly between brands; the same label number means different things in different countries; cuts are designed for a narrow band of body shapes; photographs flatten everything to a single idea of how a garment "should" look.

The result is that returns are not a sign that women are picky or indecisive. They are a sign that the system does not give shoppers enough information to choose well the first time. Returns are the workaround.

If that is true, the solution is not to scrap free returns and make shopping more punishing. The solution is to give shoppers better information up front, so they need to return fewer things at all.

Where Idntfy's own research agrees, and where it goes further

Hjort and Lantz are cited directly in Idntfy's own white paper on online fashion returns, because the foundation of their argument still holds up. The two pieces of work share the same starting point: lenient returns policies are not the neutral kindness they appear to be. They quietly shape who buys, who comes back, and how much actually gets kept.

Where the papers part company is in scope. Hjort and Lantz looked at one retailer and one set of numbers in 2016. They were asking a profitability question. The Idntfy white paper, written almost a decade later, takes that finding and zooms out. It looks at the body image questions a shopper carries into the checkout, the environmental footprint of every returned parcel, the generational shift in how Gen Z treats ordering as content creation, and the limits of what any single piece of technology can fix.

The two pieces agree on three big things. First, that free returns are structurally embedded in the way online fashion works, not a bolt-on perk. Second, that the customer who returns the most is rarely the customer worth chasing. Third, that returns are a learned behaviour, reinforced by the system, rather than a sign of indecision.

The Idntfy white paper adds a more uncomfortable conclusion that Hjort and Lantz did not reach in 2016: even better sizing tools, on their own, are not enough. A virtual try-on or a perfect measurement is only useful if a shopper actually wants the right thing on the first try, and a lot of online shopping has drifted into something closer to trial-by-parcel. In Idntfy's own community of around 1,000 women, when shoppers worked on style, wardrobe, and buying habits alongside fit, the observed return rate dropped to around 5 percent, against an industry average of 20 to 40 percent. Hjort and Lantz pointed at the policy and the maths. The Idntfy paper points at the shopper, her habits, and the system around her.

The practical upshot for anyone reading this is the same in both papers. The era of ordering three sizes and posting two back is built on a model that was never going to last. The shoppers who come out of it best are the ones who shift, even slightly, from try-and-return to choose-and-keep.

A better starting point

This is where the conversation moves from research to real life. If you know your actual body measurements, not a rough guess but a precise picture of your shape, the choice in front of you on a product page becomes much smaller. You stop ordering the size you hope will work. You stop ordering three of the same dress. You start with the one most likely to fit, and you keep it.

That is the gap Idntfy is built to close. A quick body scan on your phone creates a detailed picture of your shape and measurements, so the next time you are about to add a top to your basket, you have a real answer to the question of whether it will fit, instead of a guess. Fewer returns. Fewer disappointing parcels. More clothes that actually live in your wardrobe instead of in a queue at the post office.

Why this still matters in 2026

Almost ten years after Hjort and Lantz published their paper, the industry is finally catching up to its conclusions. Several large fashion retailers have started charging for returns. Others are tightening their windows or flagging frequent returners. The free-and-easy era is ending, and the shopper who relied on it as a fitting room is the one most exposed.

The most useful response to that shift is not to shop less. It is to shop with better information. The women who already know their measurements, their proportions, and the cuts that suit them are about to have a much easier time than the ones still ordering three sizes and hoping.

Hjort and Lantz noticed the cracks in the system early. Almost a decade on, the rest of us are noticing them too, usually one disappointing parcel at a time.

Reference: Hjort, K., & Lantz, B. (2016). The impact of returns policies on profitability: A fashion e-commerce case. Journal of Business Research, 69(11), 4980–4985. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.04.064