At least for clothing, this behaviour is officially supported by Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
I recently got a weightlifting coach and was required to buy specialized weightlifting shoes. I live in Houston which serves 7-8 million people, but there was nowhere in town to try on or buy any weightlifting shoe:
- Nike Romaleos - Adidas Adipower - Rogue Do-win / Classic
This is despite there being quite a few Nike and Adidas stores here - standalone, typical mall, and outlet malls. So I bought 3 sizes and am returning two sizes.
For Silca, maybe they have 3 different pumps and there's no way for me to stop by a local REI / bike shop to try them out. Is it worth getting a portable pump and a garage pump or can I just get by with the portable? Who the fuck knows. But I can buy both and return one if the value isn't worth the price.
Or Silca can put a store in Houston where I can try out the products.
Want to reduce return fraud? Make customers bring back items to your local store where knowledgeable salespeople can inspect it at the time of return. My guess is that eating return fraud is a lot cheaper though.
Do you think about the environmental impact of shipping around all your crap because you can't figure out what size or brand to pick?
The real option here is to pick a shoe, and pick a size. If the size doesn't fit, return it for the larger or smaller? If shipping is next day, or two day or whatever, can you really not wait that extra time?
I get that the local stores don't stock specialty items, and you may think my comment is misguided, but I look at all the thousands of people who behave similar to you, and how much waste that creates.
Is that waste larger or smaller than brick and mortar solutions? Maybe the solution is to both tax externalities and charge properly for shipping.
For non-specialty items, I'd suggest brick and mortar is better.
The challenge when we think about 3 pairs in order to keep 1, is that it isn't just the shipping on the 3 pairs, or 5 pairs of shoes shipped total.
The extra 2 pair take up extra space on each delivery van, each way. You reach a point where many people take this approach, and the company needs to be sending out 5 times as many vans to your neighborhood. That's just the end of line delivery as well.
I don't know enough about stock and warehouse, landfill, etc, but these things do add up.
We all need to be aware of the externalities and issues this cause, aside from just directly on the business profits/costs.
Unfortunately, because this has become common practice, the attitude seems to be "everyone else is doing it, so..."
The big waste with returns comes from the fact that retailers can't trust them nearly as much. With in store shopping, no one is suspicious about about taking clothes left in a changing room and putting them back on the rack. With returns, you run into all of the issues talked about in the article.
They sell a variety of high-end bicycle accessories including pumps, bottle cages, fancy lubricants (including chains pre-treated with hot wax lubricant). It's quality stuff with a pricetag to match.
A few years ago I needed a new pair, checked my size from my current pair, and ordered the exact same off Amazon. My old pair still fit, maybe even a tad big at the waist.
Then, perusing the catalog, I figured I'd also spice things up a bit, and ordered a 501 in a color I don't usually wear, for variety.
When I received them, the sizing was a complete joke.
It was absolutely impossible for me to put on the 511. My upper thighs would not fit inside the jeans without pulling on them, and after that it was impossible to button them.
The 501 was the opposite: much too big, could have probably went two sizes down.
I sent them both back, ordered a single 511 one size above, which was, you guessed, too big.
Frustrated, I sent them all back and went to my local brick and mortar store and ended up with a pair of 514s – one size below my regular one.
Specially with Silca being a cycling company, I think a lot of people here will be all too familiar with the phenomenon of "chicken legs" and how to find a pair of trousers to fit them into :-)
I'm not really built like a cyclist, so I usually have the opposite problem when buying cycling shorts :)
Although, to the point of this thread, I've found that actual sporting goods brands (as opposed to "lifestyle" or "sportswear", or whatever they're called) tend to stick to one set of measures.
I used to love my Gore biking shorts, so when I was in the market for a pair of running shorts, and saw Gore made those too, I ordered the same size and fit was the same.
I have similar experience with Decathlon, a French sports goods store, that also make their own products.
Ditto for Nike, where my basketball shoes are the same size as my running shoes – bought several years apart.
I would go one step further than just filtering. Production is usually still far too much manual labor (cheapest available). With significantly improved automation everything would change. Even just automating the cutting of cloth would allow to tailor to fit, not just standard sizes, with no significant increase in net effort.
Combined with sewing in cheap parts of the world and any kind of returns policy it becomes a logistics nightmare of course.
The solution is even higher automation.
I think you are seriously underestimating how big of a change in effort that would be. Just tracing and keeping track of a particular garment through the production would be a huge effort.
For a robot/computer.
Now what changes if you have an orderbook of 500 shirts all with custom sizes? You (or a robot or whoever) cuts out the pieces for order number 1. You can’t just grab any lefts and sew them to any backs. You need to sew that specific left with that specific back. After cutting do you mark the pieces? If so how do you remove the marks later? If not how do you QC that there were no mixups? After a shirt is done how do you make sure it ends up with the right customer?
These are all solveable of course. The thing I am disagreeing is that all you need is a robot to cut the pieces and then you can offer custom tailoring for little or no effort.
(And I'm not talking high-end clothes).
I only tried it once but it worked very well. Suggested a smaller size than I would have purchased and they fit perfectly.
Clothes are probably significantly more difficult than shoes though.
It's even worse. Some manufacturers have a single rough sizing table for an entire product category, like all shirts or pants. They will happily ignore different fittings and styles like slim fit, oversized, loose fit etc.
A little research and review-reading goes a long way.