A recent study by Accenture estimates the costs of consumer electronics returns in 2007 at $13.8 billion in the United States alone, with return rates ranging from 11 percent to 20 percent, depending on the type of product. The distribution of reasons to return the product:
- 68 percent: does not meet customer expectations
- 27 percent: buyer's remorse
- 5 percent: defects or malfunctions
Accenture believes that the return rates for functional products would decline significantly if vendors and retailers invested more in making them easier to set up and use, and in educating buyers. (As the company also designs and implements IT systems, I suppose this is good news for all people that work on a system that was made by Accenture.)

Still no insight in why people are disappointed
The report aligns with, and also quotes the work of Elke den Ouden, although the latter found a higher percentage of products that were malfunctioning (about 50%). Unfortunately both studies do not provide in-depth insights as to why the product's don't meet customer expectations. Was the product too hard to use? Did it lack a certain feature? Didn't it fit the living room? Was the power line too short? (true story, that one...) Basically it can be anything that you thought the product would do, but didn't. And that includes usability. Personally, I would really like to see a breakdown of how many products are returned because people think they're too hard to use, or that they think the products are broken, but they're not (they just were not installed properly). I would say that the reasons that customers give their retailers for returning a product are anything but reliable. All you want to do is return the product, and you'll say anything that will make the retailer do so and not pose annoying questions. And secondly, if a product just disappointed you, how motivated are you to spend time on providing rich and accurate information?

Exact numbers, but no mention of methodology
And what about the methodology of the Accenture study? Den Ouden got her PhD on the subject, which means a publicly available thesis. Not in any mentions of the Accenture study, nor on the Accenture website could I find any mention of how the study was setup. Was it survey based? Was it experts reviews? Was it a literature review? How the hell did they come up with that 68 percent and how can the difference with the work of Den Ouden be explained? One of the downsides of commercial companies doing research and the putting the results out there: very interesting results, and as a researcher I would love to cite them, but I can't, because there was not peer review and you can't find the results anywhere. I'll send them an e-mail, let's see what they say. They've had a good round of free publicity, now we can have a little more information...

UPDATE
Terry Steger's (one of the authors of the report) office was so kind as to send me the report after I had send them an e-mail. The report mentions Accenture's proprietary approach called High Performance Business Research as the method that produced the data. Though it's still not completely clear to me what exactly that is, you can get a bit more background information on this section of Accenture's website.