The Gap Between Strategy and Execution
The headline number in this survey looks encouraging at first glance: 86% of the 150 senior retail leaders surveyed across the UK and Europe say their organization already has a circularity strategy for returned merchandise. That figure suggests the industry has largely absorbed the idea that returns represent recoverable value rather than pure loss. The problem shows up in the very next data point, where only 9% of those same retailers actually resell more than half of their returned products at full price, a gap wide enough to suggest that having a strategy and executing one are two very different achievements.
That gap is the real story here for anyone running technology or operations at a retailer of meaningful scale. A strategy document sitting in a sustainability or operations team's files does very little if the underlying systems, inventory visibility, grading workflows, resale channel integration, are not built to act on it consistently. The survey suggests most retailers have made the policy commitment without yet making the systems investment required to actually deliver on it at volume.
Where the Value Actually Leaks Out
On average, 12% of all returned items generate zero value once they come back through the door, according to the survey. That is not a small number when applied against total return volume at any retailer processing meaningful ecommerce order flow, and it represents pure write-off, items that go straight to disposal or unsellable inventory rather than resale, discount channels, or recycling streams that could recover at least partial value. Every percentage point in that zero-value category is margin that a better process could have converted into revenue, however modest.
The survey also found that 82% of respondents believe up to half of their returned stock could still capture additional value through enhanced recommerce strategies, which is a striking admission. These are the same organizations reporting the zero-value figure above, meaning most retailers surveyed can see the value sitting unrecovered in their own returns stream but have not yet closed the gap between recognizing the opportunity and building the operational capability to capture it.
Who Ran the Numbers
The survey was commissioned by ReBound Returns and Advanced Supply Chain, known as ASC, and conducted by research firm Opinium between July 13 and July 29, surveying 150 senior leaders at mid-to-large retailers with revenue above 100 million pounds or euros. That revenue threshold matters: this is not a survey capturing small independent retailers still building out basic returns infrastructure, it is a survey of organizations large enough to have dedicated operations and supply chain functions, which makes the execution gap it uncovers more notable rather than less.
Stuart Greenfield of ASC framed the opportunity in operational terms rather than sustainability terms, arguing that the priority now is looking at what comes back as inventory with potential value and determining the best route for each item. That framing, treating returns as an inventory routing problem rather than a waste management problem, is the conceptual shift the survey's own data suggests most retailers have not yet operationalized despite having adopted the language of circularity.
The Technology Retailers Are Missing
Converting returned inventory into recovered revenue at scale requires infrastructure most retailers were never built around: rapid grading systems that can assess condition and route an item to the right disposition channel within hours rather than days, integration with resale marketplaces or secondary channels that can absorb graded inventory without manual listing work, and real-time visibility into which SKUs are worth reselling at full price versus discounting versus recycling. Building that stack from scratch is a meaningful technology investment, which likely explains why so many retailers have a strategy but not yet the execution to match it.
This is also a genuinely different problem than the forward fulfillment systems most retailers have spent the last decade optimizing. Forward fulfillment deals with known, catalogued inventory moving in predictable volumes. Reverse logistics deals with unpredictable condition, unpredictable volume, and unpredictable timing, since a retailer does not control when a customer decides to return an item or in what state it arrives. That unpredictability is precisely why so many organizations have under-invested in the systems layer here relative to their forward-facing supply chain.
The Cost of Treating Returns as Waste
62% of respondents said they already make regular efforts to recover value from unsellable goods, and 27% describe circularity as core to their returns management approach, both figures suggesting meaningful intent exists across the sample even where execution lags. But intent without a systems investment behind it tends to produce exactly the pattern this survey found: broad strategic buy-in paired with a persistently large share of returns generating no value at all.
For retailers still treating returns primarily as a cost center to be minimized rather than an inventory stream to be optimized, this survey offers a fairly direct benchmark. If your organization cannot say with confidence what percentage of returned stock is resold at full price versus written off entirely, you likely sit closer to the median retailer in this survey than to the small group of leaders actually capturing the value everyone claims to be chasing.
Building a Recommerce Stack That Pays for Itself
The practical starting point for closing this gap is measurement before technology. Retailers need accurate visibility into where their own returns currently land, full-price resale, discount channel, recycling, or pure write-off, before they can justify or design the systems investment needed to shift that distribution. Many of the organizations in this survey may not yet have that baseline measurement in place, which would explain why 82% can sense an opportunity in the abstract without being able to quantify it precisely enough to build a business case around.
Once that baseline exists, the technology investment case tends to build itself, because recovered revenue from returns is close to pure margin improvement rather than new revenue requiring new customer acquisition spend. Retail technology leaders evaluating recommerce infrastructure investment for 2027 planning cycles should treat this survey's gap between strategy and execution as the opportunity, not the embarrassment; the fact that competitors have not yet closed it either is exactly what makes early execution here a genuine differentiator.
