Australians have long had a love affair with ecommerce and their ardour shows no sign of diminishing.
As a nation, we spent a whopping $61.2 billion on online retail in the 12 months to February 2025, according to the NAB Online Retail Sales Index: February 2025. That figure has been steadily increasing for years and it now accounts for 14 per cent of the total retail trade estimate.
Globally, the rise and rise of online shopping is an even bigger story: e-commerce sales surpassed $US4.1 trillion in 2024 as billions of consumers around the world eschewed bricks and mortar buying in favour of letting their fingers do the walking.
Delivering a customer experience that keeps buyers coming back
Today’s online shoppers are an ever-more-discerning lot. They’re accustomed to receiving slick, seamless service from the likes of Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos famously said many years ago that the best customer service is ‘if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works’.
Having become habituated to things ‘just working’, Australian shoppers now have little patience when they don’t. Offer a clunky customer journey, a web site that’s tricky to navigate or takes too long to refresh, or an excessively complex check out process and they’re more than likely to keep on scrolling, faster than you can say ‘yeah nah’.
That’s bad news for local retailers that aren’t delivering personalised, friction free interactions at every touchpoint – and striving to optimise them on the daily.
‘Every time one organisation improves and simplifies clicks to purchase, others need to take the same step or risk being left behind,’ KPMG Director, Customer and Operations Advisory Richard Large noted in the consultancy’s Australian Customer Experience Excellence report 2024.
Homing in on the returns process
But it’s not enough just to make things ultra-easy for customers when they’re opening their wallets.
Offering an effortless returns process is every bit as important, if not more so, given the average return rate for online orders is 15.2 per cent, according to a 2024 survey conducted by the International Council of Shopping Centers in the US.
That’s three times higher than the five per cent return rate for bricks and mortar purchases.
Eighty-two per cent of customers say return policies influence their purchasing decisions when shopping online, the survey revealed.
Shorten the free return window or make it difficult or expensive for shoppers to return items that are damaged, faulty or don’t suit and they’ll more than likely take their business elsewhere.
Sending things back simply and securely
Against that backdrop, it’s incumbent on Australian suppliers to ensure they’re getting online returns right; offering a simple, secure process that generates rapid refunds and doesn’t lay customers open to cyber-risk.
In today’s times, that risk is ever present and it frequently comes courtesy of password-based log-in processes.
Traditional passwords represent a major vulnerability for retailers and their customers. Very often, they are the starting point for data breaches, account takeover and identity theft.
That’s why migrating your online retail business to password-less authentication makes so much sense. It reduces the risk posed by password re-use and relieves customers of the burden of trying to remember scores of unique complex passphrases, each containing spaces, capital letters and punctuations marks.
You can further strengthen your cyber defences by deploying automated fraud detection and identity verification tools and providing continuous fraud alerts and guidance to online shoppers.
Setting your retail business up for a more secure future in FY2026
Returns are part and parcel of operating an online retail enterprise in today’s times. Alienating buyers with a frustrating returns process, or laying them open to cyber risk with an insecure one, will damage your reputation and destroy the customer loyalty you work so hard to foster.
That’s why investing in robust cybersecurity measures is critical. It builds trust and lays the foundation for stronger customer relationships. If those things matter to your retail business, there’s never been a better time to start fortifying your returns process.
This article was written by Johan Fantenberg, Product and Solution Director at Ping Identity.