Boxing Day ecommerce merchant returns by the numbers: Exclusive data from Loop
Vaishali Ravi
·January 23, 2025
Want to learn all about the benchmarks behind BFCM shopping and returns data? You’re in the right place.
Recently, we showcased our proprietary data from over 4,000 Loop merchants, focusing on their sales metrics and trends during the Black Friday - Cyber Monday sales event in 2024.
But as we all know, many of those sales aren’t final—a higher than average number of holiday sales end up being processed as returns or exchanges.
While we’ll cover the entire post-holiday returns window in more detail in a future post, today, let’s focus on returns processed on the most popular day for sending back products—otherwise known as Boxing Day.
What is Boxing Day?
No, it’s not the day of the Mike Tyson v. Jake Paul fight: Boxing Day is a historic name for the day after Christmas, December 26th. It gets its name from a British tradition of collecting alms boxes of donations for the poor, and giving the donated boxes to recipients the day after Christmas.
Now, however, many people associate Boxing Day with the practice of “boxing up” their unwanted gifts and sending them back for a refund or exchange.
In fact, this Boxing Day, Loop handled over 159,000 returns. That’s more returns in a single day than we handled in the entire month of December 2018.
Now, let’s dig into our Boxing Day returns data and learn how our merchants are leveling up their Boxing Day returns management strategies.
Boxing Day 2024 by the numbers
First, let’s look at the most recent Boxing Day. As predicted, it was a huge day for returns—but metrics varied based on category and geography.
Let’s break down Boxing Day merchant data by region. All numbers have been converted to USD for easy comparison.
US Merchants 🇺🇸
- Total Loop Merchants: 2,150
- Submitted Return Volume: 143.7K
- Total value of returns: $19.3M
- Retained Revenue ($): $7.3M
- Average Return Value: $134
UK Merchants 🇬🇧
- Total Loop Merchants: 88
- Submitted Return Volume: 3,100
- Total value of returns: $367.26K USD
- Retained Revenue: $70.08K USD
- Average Return Value: $118.63 USD
AU/NZ Merchants 🇦🇺
- Total Loop Merchants: 275
- Submitted Return Volume: 5,766
- Total value of returns: $419.11K USD
- Retained Revenue ($) / Rate: $201.8K USD
- Average Return Value: $72.65 USD
Next, what fun stats can we pull out of our data?
- Loop merchants made nearly $300k in Upsell alone on Boxing Day
- Averaged over the day, Loop received about 2 returns per second
- Our busiest return hour was 12pm EST, with more than 14,000 returns submitted (that’s more than 4 returns per second)
- This was more returns in one hour than Loop handled in the entire month of December 2017
- Noon EST has been the busiest Boxing Day return hour for the last 3 years running. Last year we maxed out at 3 returns per second!
In both the UK and Australia/NZ, it's common for people to take longer breaks, and travel between Christmas and New Year's. Because of this, Boxing Day was not actually the highest return day for these merchants.
- As of New Year's Day, the highest-volume return day for merchants in the UK, AU, NZ was 12/30. However, as anticipated, we saw even higher return volumes for these markets the week after new years. The peak return day for UK merchants was 1/2, while for merchants in Australia and New Zealand, it was 1/4
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Those are high numbers, but how do they compare to past years? With limited exceptions, we’re seeing a rising return rate year over year, for each of the previous two years.
Boxing Day 2024 vs Boxing Day 2023
- # of Same Shops: 1,857
- Submitted Return Volume: 135.9K (⬆ 15.2%)
- Total Value of Returns ($): $18.2M (⬆ 17.5%)
- Retained Revenue ($): $6.9M (⬆️ 18.73%)
- ARV ($): $134 (⬆ 2%)
Boxing Day 2023 vs Boxing Day 2022
- # of Same Shops: 1,058
- Submitted Return Volume: 79.1K (⬆ 36.2%)
- Total Value of Returns ($): $10.3M (⬆ 36.4%)
- Retained Revenue ($): $4.23M (⬆️ 39.6%)
- ARV ($): $131 (⬆ 2.9%)
Merchant Trends (Boxing Day ’24 vs ‘23 YoY)
- Higher return rates across the board (except Swimwear) Nearly every vertical saw an increase in return count YoY (+15% on average), except for Swimwear, which saw a 3.5% decrease in return volume
- Why Swimwear bucked the trend Almost a quarter of Swimwear merchants decreased their return windows between Boxing Day ‘23 and ‘24, which may have contributed to the decrease in returns submitted
- A jump in return rates for Cosmetics & Personal Care Cosmetics & Personal Care saw the largest jump in both return volume and return value with 36% and 38% increases YoY respectively
- More merchants used the Keep Item feature 25% more Accessories shops used Keep Items returns this year than last (16 → 20 shops YoY), and Accessories vertical saw a 61% increase in Keep Items returns. Keep Item enables customers to get a refund without sending back the item, eliminating the burden of return shipping costs for lower-value items.
- Apparel also saw an increase in Keep Items shops (~10%, 42 → 46 shops YoY), however this vertical saw a decrease in the number of Keep Items returns, suggesting that merchants are cracking down on which products and purchases are eligible for the Keep Item feature
As far as Boxing Day is concerned, the tradition of sending back unwanted gifts shows no sign of slowing down—but with Loop’s unique features, merchants can do more to preserve revenue during the returns process.
You can optimize for exchanges, and even offer upsells, to retain the value of the original purchase and retain a shopper you’d otherwise lose. And by using Keep Item to credit customers for unwanted items, you’ll be able to eliminate reverse logistics expenses on items that you’re unlikely to resell, and enhance your brand’s sustainability by recommending donation and recycling alternatives rather than sending returned products to landfills.
Loop empowers merchants to make the most of Boxing Day returns with versatile options that help them boost profit margins and keep customers happy.
Up next, we’ll share our data related to trends around the entire post-holiday period, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, want to know more about Loop? Sign up for a demo today ↓
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With Loop, your brand can offer everything from refunds to direct exchanges to shopper incentives and more. Even better? These exchanges build your business.