Dishonest shoppers and ‘serial returners’ are being caught out by retailers which are checking customer’s Facebook and Instagram feeds to see if they have been photographed wearing the item
- ASOS scours social media of people it suspects lie about not receiving clothes
- Harrods ‘denying refunds to loyalty card holders who constantly request returns’
- 45% of online retailers are now planning to ban serial returners, research shows
Retailers are using social media to clamp down on shoppers who lie about not receiving items bought online and ‘serial returners’.
Online giant ASOS has started scouring the Facebook and Instagram profiles of people who have been flagged by its security team for repeatedly claiming they hadn’t received their package.
The retailer admitted it checks the customer’s social media to see if they have photographed themselves wearing the item.
Online giant ASOS has started scouring the Facebook and Instagram profiles of people who repeatedly claim their parcels haven’t arrived
But ASOS said it only relates to customers who say they have returned a package and still demand a refund, it told The Telegraph.
The company said it didn’t use the technique to catch out serial returners, because customers are ‘well within their rights’ to send back items.
Serial returner are shoppers who deliberately buy several clothes knowing full well that they won’t keep some of them.
It’s become such a problem for online shops that 45 per cent of retailers are planning to ban them, researcher Brightpearl found.
Brightpearl asked over 200 bosses at online retailers in Britain and over one third said they’d seen a spike in serial returners in the last year.
Meanwhile, sources told The Telegraph Harrods has started denying refunds to loyalty card holders who’d requested a large number of refunds in short spaces of time.
Harrods has started denying refunds to loyalty card holders to serial returners, sources say
Sales associates are said to often monitor those customer’s social media accounts to make sure they’re not wearing the items once and sending them back.
A Harrods spokesman told the paper: ‘Harrods is a customer-service centred business and has a 14 days returns policy for in-store sales.
‘However there are a number of exempted product categories stated on the returns policy, and we reserve the right to designate a product as being non-returnable at the point of sale.’