Black Friday's second wave: get your returns process ready before the orders peak

Black Friday gives you the biggest order week of the year. Six weeks later it gives you the biggest returns week of the year, and that second wave gets far less preparation than the first. By the time the January returns pile up, it is too late to change anything about how they were created: your return policy was printed on every order confirmation, and your process was whatever it was when the orders shipped.

That makes late October the real deadline. A return policy applies to orders placed under it, so whatever you want to change (fees, periods, exchange options) has to be decided and live before your Black Friday campaigns start. And the window is wider than the name suggests: NIQ's analysis of last year's peak shows that Black Friday has stretched into a full "Black November", with revenue spread across the whole month rather than one discount day. The first returns from that stretched peak land in your warehouse in mid-November, not January.

In this article we walk through the three layers of returns preparation that still fit in the coming weeks: the policy decisions to lock in before 27 November, the product data work that prevents returns from existing at all, and the process that decides whether January is a controlled wave or a backlog.

The numbers behind the January wave

Returns are not a niche problem, and this year the regulator put fresh numbers on it. In a letter published in July 2026, the Dutch competition authority ACM noted that with a clothing return rate of 25%, the Netherlands is among the European countries with the highest percentage of clothing returns, and that products bought online are returned up to three times more often than products bought in a physical store. The context of that letter is telling in itself: industry association Thuiswinkel.org is preparing sector research into how return fees affect return volumes, and asked the ACM to confirm the initiative is allowed. The sector, in other words, considers returns a big enough problem to study collectively.

The cost side is just as concrete. Thuiswinkel.org has estimated the handling of a single return (unpacking, checking, administration and getting the item back on sale) at around €12.50 per shipment. Set that against what the Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor says about this year's orders: the average Dutch online purchase dropped from €103 to €100. At that order value, a handful of returns quietly erases the margin on a multiple of that in sales. During a discount-driven peak, when margins are thinner than usual, the math gets worse.

Policy first: the decisions to make before 27 November

Your return policy is the one layer you genuinely cannot fix afterwards, so start there.

Free or paid returns. Dutch law gives consumers fourteen days to withdraw from an online purchase, but you may charge the return shipping costs, provided you say so clearly before the sale. More and more shops do: Wehkamp introduced a return fee back in 2023, explicitly to curb return volumes, and Thuiswinkel.org reported at the time that members who introduced fees saw returns fall without a clear hit to sales. Whether a fee fits your shop depends on your category and your competition. What should not happen is deciding this in December.

The return period over the holidays. A customer buying a gift on Black Friday may not see it opened until Christmas. An extended holiday return period costs little, removes a real objection, and is exactly the kind of service where a Dutch webshop can beat the foreign platforms that now take one in seven Dutch online purchases.

Exchange before refund. A return does not have to be the end of the order. Make exchanging for another size or model the easiest path in your return flow, and a portion of your January refunds becomes January revenue instead.

Whatever you decide: policy changes apply to new orders only, so communicate them on the product page and in the checkout, and get them live before the campaigns do.

Prevention beats processing: product data as your first returns filter

The cheapest return is the one that never happens, and most returns start on the product page. When Wehkamp introduced its return fee, it named the reason most clothing comes back: size and fit. That is not a logistics problem, it is an information problem, and it is fixable with better product data. Accurate size tables per brand, real measurements in the specifications, photos that show scale and material, and reviews that mention fit all let the customer make the right choice the first time.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is the same product data discipline that the new EU guarantee labels demanded of your shop this autumn, and that AI-driven shopping increasingly rewards. A PIM that holds this data as the single source of truth, connected to your shop through a solid integration layer, means the information that prevents returns is maintained once and correct everywhere.

Process: the part that falls over in January

The third layer is what happens when the returns do come. A manual process (emails to customer service, refunds typed into the payment dashboard, stock corrected by hand) works in a normal week and collapses in the second week of January.

The fix is treating a return as a data flow through your stack, just like an order. A customer announces the return in a portal instead of an inbox. The return gets a label and a status. The warehouse checks the item against that status. And the stock correction and credit note flow into your ERP through the same integration that handles your orders. Shopware's standard returns management covers the shop side of this; the connection to your ERP and your warehouse is where an integration platform earns its keep. The honest test: if your team can tell, without searching, where any given return is in the process, you are ready for January. If the answer lives in someone's mailbox, you are not.

There is one more reason to get this layer right: the data. Which products come back, from which customers, for which reasons? That information should flow back into purchasing and into your product pages. A product with a structurally high return rate is either described wrong or bought wrong, and both are fixable.

What you can still do before 27 November

A realistic list for the coming four weeks:

1. Decide and publish your return policy, including fees and the holiday return period.
   
   
2. Fix size tables and measurements on your top-selling categories. Not the whole catalogue, only the products that will carry the peak.
   
   
3. Make exchanges the easiest option in your return flow.
   
   
4. Walk one test return through your entire process, from announcement to credit note, and count the manual steps. Every manual step you remove now is removed a few hundred times in January.

Too late for this year: a full returns portal implementation or a new ERP integration. If January hurts, that is exactly the Q1 project to scope, with real data from the wave you are about to measure.

Frequently asked questions

Learn more about preparing your webshop for the returns wave

The January returns wave is the most predictable event in your e-commerce calendar: it follows your best sales month as surely as the invoice follows the order. The shops that suffer from it are not the ones with the most returns, but the ones that treated returns as an afterthought while every policy, product page and process decision was still open.

As a Shopware Business Partner and official Alumio partner, Memo builds webshops where the returns flow is part of the architecture, not an exception to it. Expecting a serious wave after Black Friday? Request a returns-flow scan or book an introduction call, and we will map where your policy, product data and ERP integration can absorb it.