Single Zalando return travels 7,000 km

BERLIN – Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, Zalando, sends returned goods zig-zagging thousands of kilometres across Europe, a new investigation has discovered. Researchers attached GPS trackers to ten Zalando orders before returning them and found that months later, not one had been sold again. Instead, they were clocking up to 7,000 kilometres across Europe due to Zalando’s clunky ‘predictive analytics’ algorithm for returned goods. Zalando claims to offer climate-neutral returns and is said to receive up to 480 orders per minute.