Retailers brace for £360m of Christmas returns UK fashion retailers are facing £360m of Christmas 2020 clothing and footwear returns, new research exclusive to Drapers shows. Exclusive A report commissioned by research consultancy Retail Economics and law firm Penningtons Manches Cooper, revealed consumers return about 17% of the value of their online clothing and footwear purchases. This equates to around £2bn of returns on ecommerce sales of £11.4bn across the whole of 2020. This compares to a returns rate of less than 12% for store purchases of £20.2bn in 2020. It means retailers have dealt with £4.3bn of returns across 2020 as a whole. These figures were used to generate data on the proportion of Christmas gifting related to clothing and footwear, average transaction values, and a combination of other Retail Economics proprietary data on the size of the sector, to derive the estimate of £360m in Christmas returns.