It’s time for your secondary market to play a primary role

From the January-February 2020 edition of Supply Chain Management Review.

January-February 2020

If the holidays at your household were like most, the gifts were chosen and wrapped with care, and then half were returned in the week after Christmas. Maybe more than half. After all, who among us hasn’t bought…

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If you attended the most recent Reverse Logistics Association conference, you might have noticed two different sets of exhibitors. One set was marketing reverse logistics solutions and services to facilitate swift and efficient returns from customers who had second thoughts about the items they'd ordered. The other con-tingent was composed of salvage dealers, online auctioneers and software providers with solutions to help retailers and manu-facturers do a better job of recouping value from the returned goods.

They illustrated the two steps of the reverse logistics process: First, you have to develop efficient and cost-effective processes to get returned goods from wherever they were shipped back into your hands at your store, distribution center or to the 3PL man-aging your returns. Just as important is the second step: You have to dispose of those goods once they're back in your control.

Without question, returns handling, the subject of the lead story in this issue of Supply Chain Management Review, has long been neglected by supply chain managers. But even more so has been that second step of disposition. In the past, many firms might have donated returned and over-stock items to charity or paid to have them sent to the landfill. The volumes weren't large enough to justify a significant investment in the pro-cess. With the rise of e-commerce and the “Amazon-ification” of retail, that's changing.

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