Please get in touch with us at (product-returns@soton.ac.uk) if you are:
- a Chief Financial Officer aiming to find ways to deliver the returns proposition (free returns, money back guarantees, etc.) into bottom line improvements
- a person handling Corporate Social Responsibility needing to reduce land-fill
- a Loss Prevention leader striving to reduce the losses due to fraud and abuse
- a buyer wanting to improve product category profitability
- a logistics service provider looking to reduce the cost of returns and deliveries
- a company interested in working with us
- a researcher wishing to join our team
- a journalist interested in publishing about product returns
- a policy-maker keen to know more
- an individual with a question
There are a number of ways to work with us, including the following:
You could give a guest lecture to under-graduate or post-graduate students in a module on "Strategic Operations Management" or "Sustainable Operations and Supply Chains".
You could provide a topic for an MSc dissertation project, where one of our students would work with you for about 3 months, from May/June to early September. See examples of previous MSc Dissertations:
You can read previous MSc projects using the links below:
- A catalogue of returns fraud types
- An agent-based model of product returns
- Customer experiments: will providing information change behaviours?
- Environmental impact of returning to store
- Fraud detection strategies
- Fraud survey analysis
- Modelling consumer returns probability
- Modelling product returns probability
- Returns survey analysis
- Unit level identification
You could commission a research project, tailored to your needs. We are passionate about doing research that helps practitioners solve problems!
We are always looking for returns data in anonymised form. Are you able to provide some? Here is our data wish list.
We look forward to hearing from you!