The Challenging Increase of Online Customer Returns in Fashion - A literature Review

Since I have been sitting at home for over seven weeks without visiting the school, it is easy to forget everything you have to do and all deadlines. Blogging has been one of those things. So, here I am writing my first post. With the literature review method, I am doing an individual field study about online customer returns in the fashion industry (as you probably could tell from the heading). The purpose incorporates giving an overview of the field of customer returns in e-commerce and the applied conceptual frameworks from the last ten years. This will also present the gaps where further studies are needed.

The first two or three weeks of the field study course were dedicated to the search for journal articles. Over twenty journals have been search in total, most of them by systematically going through them year by year from 2010 to 2020, but towards the end I realized that it takes to much time and it was not that much written about customer returns overall. So I changed method and used keywords such as "returns", "online returns", "customer returns" within journals that could be of interest. In addition, google scholar was used to utilize the function of citations to find more related articles. All in all, fifty-nine articles has been found treating customer returns in some way. Another two or three weeks has passed, dedicated to quickly skim the articles to find some notable keywords, used method, the focus of the study, what industry is being investigated and with what empirical material.

Right now, the articles are divided into different groups using the keywords so that I eventually can find themes for the literature review. I will also start on the introduction of my report. At first I planned on doing an journal article format but now I am thinking of just doing an conference paper and do it really good, since that is the easiest method. But we will see towards the end, if there is time left to design an journal article format since they are similar in structure and content the possibility exists. I had tuition this morning with Jenny, which made me feel a little less stressed so that is always good. Now, back to it!