Reverse Logistics

Most supply chains are built to push products in one direction: from supplier to warehouse to customer. Reverse logistics is what happens when goods travel the other way. A customer returns a jacket, a faulty kettle comes back under warranty, a pallet of unsold stock heads back to the distributor, an old phone is sent off to be recycled. All of that backwards movement, and the cost and effort behind it, is reverse logistics. For ecommerce sellers it is no longer a side issue: returns alone can run to a fifth of everything sold online, and how you handle that flow decides whether it quietly drains your margin or becomes a way to recover value. This guide explains what reverse logistics is, the main types you will deal with, how the process works step by step, where it goes wrong and how to keep stock and orders accurate when goods are moving in reverse.

Returns are the quiet line item that decides whether an ecommerce business is profitable. The customer paid, the order shipped, the dashboard says “delivered” — and then 14 days later the parcel comes back, the marketplace claws the payout, the SKU sits in a return bin nobody has time to inspect, and the unit economics that looked fine on the contribution margin row turn into a loss after reverse logistics. The brands that grow past £1m a year almost always have a returns process that someone owns. The brands that stall almost always treat returns as an exception to be handled when somebody complains.