What happens when you return an order from an online shop? VPRO Tegenlicht dives into the returns industry this week to find out. 'Everything stands or falls with the consumer.'

Watch the full episode. VPRO "at full return"

'The volumes have become huge in the last decade,' says Tjitse Lawerman of the big buyout company Kooistra.com in Leeuwarden. 'Every year it gets more. If those big webshops grow by 20 per cent every year, you can assume that the return flows also grow 20 per cent every year. And there are more and more suppliers.'

Lawerman is someone who finds himself on the back end of webshops like Bol.com, CoolBlue or Amazon. That is the side that an ordinary person does not easily cast his eye on. As a consumer, he scrolls through the offers on the sites of the online shops on his smartphone or tablet, and one or two days later the parcel delivery man is at his door: with an airfryer, a coffee maker, a book, three trousers and five shirts, a lamp, two pairs of shoes, a big bag of cat food or a computer. Of those clothes and shoes, about 50 per cent are then returned by the customer. Of everything else, three-and-a-half to five-and-a-half per cent go back. 

'We as a company benefit from those returns, but actually it doesn't fit with the sustainable way we want to live'

Chances are, all returned items that have a plug on them will end up with buyer Lawerman. Because once the packaging is opened, the product can no longer be sold for new price. 'If the packaging has not been opened, the product comes back into stock at the online shop,' he says. 'If the box is open or damaged, or the item is broken, it ends up in a corner. Of course, that corner is getting bigger and bigger. Many companies are not yet set up to sort out those returns, and think: it will still make a slight profit if I resell it. 

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