Apparently Americans will return 10% of their Christmas gifts this year and the breakdown is fascinating. 62% of returns will be clothing and shoes that don’t fit properly or aren’t considered ‘suitable’ by the recipient. Not even close, by comparison, is the 16% toys, games and hobby supplies that will be returned and exchanged, closely followed by 14% returns in consumer electronics.

So what can you do to avoid being the giver of an unwanted gift or being lumbered with something you don’t want?

First, if you’re not sure about the item you’re buying, ask about the retailer’s returns policy – some online retailers have a brilliant exchange system for gifts, others charge a fortune in return postage – be sure that it’s possible to return or get a refund on an unwanted gift item so that the recipient can get something they do want.

If you’re the recipient, you may wish to ask the giver of an unwanted present for the receipt – it’s tricky but if you know them well and are willing to explain why (I already have one, it’s a size too small/large, I don’t wear T-shirts that colour etc) it can be done tactfully. Saying ‘I hate it and will never wear it’ may not get you the receipt, in fact, it may ensure you don’t get many more presents, so run your reasoning by a third party before launching into your request!

Always bear in mind that if they buyer didn’t pay cash, your refund may take the form of a gift token or voucher or for some stores, you can only get a refund onto the card that was used to make the purchase.

If you can’t exchange or refund, you can try selling your unwanted item on eBay – there are fee free weekends where the bulk of items on offer are unwanted gifts. Alternatively you can try for a swap – if it’s worth less than £50 lots of local papers allow you to put in a free advert, or even just give it away to a charity shop or online through sites like Freecycle, Greencyle or Freegle, in the hope that karma will deliver a free item that you want at some point in future.

Have you ever had that experience where you see a fantastic item in a shop window and yet when you try it on, it just doesn’t look good on you? Most of us have been through that disappointment and it’s one of the things that can make shopping online quite stressful – bad enough to feel the let down when you try something on in the shop, but so much worse to feel it when you’ve ordered something and had it delivered and then have to send it back.

The answer is to put in a bit of research first. There are so many different ways of sizing clothes (even the New York Times can’t work it out) that it’s good try on some of the clothes from major brands to see how they fit you – that helps you choose the right size when you shop online.

Then look for an online retailer who’s been around for a while – there are loads of fly-by-night scamsters, often selling fake clothing, who vanish before any disgruntled customer can get to them to ask for a refund, so companies who have been selling online for several years have normally ironed out their customer service and are able to offer excellent advice: look out for numbers for advisers you can call to talk through your decisions – you may not need to use them but the fact that they exist is a positive sign. Google the company and see what others have said about them – that helps you work out which are the genuine long-term retailers who care about customers and selling really good clothing online.

Check delivery systems carefully, many small sites deliver only within their own national boundaries – and look at the delivery costs because often you can make a substantial saving if you shop with a friend and get a bulk discount or reach the ‘free delivery’ level.

A button-down decision

As if Hurricane Gustav wasn’t enough – teenagers in Lafayette Parish School System in New Orleans have to contend with a sudden clampdown on school uniform policy. The problem has arisen for female students whose uniform is a polo-shirt which should, according to the schools, have a maximum of four buttons. The problem has arisen because the families of the students have bought polo-shirts with eight buttons. Of course it does sound a little over the top as a reaction, but the point is that if a teenage girl unbuttons eight, rather than four, buttons on a polo-shirt, it can be a real distraction from learning for her male classmates!

Counterfeit China goes full circle

Knockoff polo-shirts go full circle from Beijing to Beijing. In a hilarious development, con artists who have been scamming top level polo-shirt retailers have discovered that the polo-shirts they bought in Beijing have gone back there, as top class mementos.

The way it worked was that young men from Britain would go to the huge street stalls of Hong Kong, Shanghai or Beijing where counterfeit Fred Perry, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger polo-shirts are sold. They would buy bagfuls of knockoff jeans, polo-shirts and trainers and take them home, where they would go into upmarket retail boutiques in major towns and buy identical items to the counterfeits they’d picked up in China and then – a day or so later – return to the shop with the real receipt but the fake clothing.

Because they had a perfectly genuine receipt, they would get their money back and have earned a top of the line polo-shirt for the price of a street stall counterfeit. But here’s the funny bit. Those returned clothes would be sent to catalogue shops and outlet stores which sell off seconds and returns for the big brands at tiny fractions of the original price. And who ends up buying them? Well – very often the purchasers are Chinese tourists on holiday in the UK – desperate to stock up on Western brands, so they go home, quite often, with a counterfeit polo-shirt that was probably made only a couple of miles away from their own home and that they could have purchased there for a tenth of the price they paid in the UK.

Label courtesy of sonictk

Here I try to answer a few questions posed by our customers.

Q. Bit disappointed in your ‘no swapping’ policy. To charge the postage again just to change one shirt size is a little extortionate.

A. I understand the frustration that can be caused when you select one wrong item and just want to swap it for another. It sounds simple. But for us it’s not that simple and I’ll try to explain why.

Your returned item takes time to process.

The goods need to be quality checked and returned to stock.

Then our warehouse staff need to pick and replace the item with the replacement which takes time.

The goods then need to be sent out again so we need to add on the postage cost.

Our standard postage rate of £5.00 also includes the cost of packing. This not only means the postage cost itself but also the poly bags in which the garments are packed, the delivery bags, delivery stickers and, as mentioned above, the time of our warehouse staff.

Unlike other companies in the wholesale clothing industry charge a restocking fee for returning items. Polo-shirts.co.uk do not charge a restocking fee.

I hope that this explains why we aren’t able to offer a “swap” for your returned items.