Osage Venture Partners is happy to announce that we have co-led a $5M Series A financing for Returnalyze, which is changing the future of commerce by helping retailers take control of returns and improve e-commerce outcomes through an AI-driven intelligent platform.
As e-commerce sales have grown, rising from 15% of total retail in 2019 to 22% as of today to reach more than $1.0 trillion annually, so have returns. The average rate of returns for online purchases in 2022 is 21%, an increase from 18% in 2021 and 11% in 2020, costing retailers $218B in lost sales. Returns have a detrimental impact on the business, shrinking profit margins, negatively impacting the consumer experience, hurting sales efficiency, and increasing supply chain constraints and costs. As e-commerce continues to grow rapidly, returns are becoming an increasingly pressing issue for retailers.
As a result, it is no longer sufficient to solve the logistical and operational challenges of returns, where most solutions in the space have focused to date. Retailers must now focus on how they can decrease the volume of returns by understanding their root causes and understanding the return as part of the overall customer journey. To do this, retailers must first collect and analyze data from not only the return itself, but also all of the surrounding context across multiple siloed platforms (Shopify, Google Analytics, ERP, warehouse management, reverse logistics solutions, etc.) that touch every part of the business. Most retailers struggle to consolidate and normalize this data, let alone extract insights and take action across a multitude of potential decision points to reduce returns and improve the customer experience – from refining the fit and sizing descriptions on a website, to changing suppliers in the supply chain, to informing future product development for manufacturers or product assortment for retailers.
Returnalyze’s platform addresses this pain by easily ingesting data from various sources and in any format. The solution then structures this data according to a common taxonomy and provides an intelligent dashboard to analyze returns and retail performance. Returnalyze allows customers to understand their data and drill down to the root causes of returns across all brands, product SKUs, channels, and key attributes such as size and fit. The solution offers recommendations and predictive insights, allowing retailers to anticipate and preempt returns-related issues and measure the impact of suggested interventions. Returnalyze has delivered strong ROI for customers, having reduced return rates by 15%, saving customers 100s of hours in operational costs, increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value, and improving recovery of lost sales from returns.
Driving this success is Returnalyze’s fantastic team. Returnalyze is led by CEO Oded Benyo, an experienced executive whose combination of focused execution and exciting vision captivated us throughout our diligence. Alongside Oded is an exceptional team of world-class operators including CTO Will Plourde, SVP of Business Development Keith Savitz, VP of Customer Success Christine Bradford, and Chief Analytics Officer John Bowman. The executive team’s tenacity and customer-focused mindset have created a company culture that Osage is proud to partner with. We believe this team has the drive and expertise to realize their vision of allowing retailers to take back control of returns, positioning the company to become the leading returns analytics platform.
We are quite excited to join several respected and successful investors to support Returnalyze including Flybridge Capital, Data Point Capital, and Boston Seed Capital. We look forward to partnering with Returnalyze to help retailers take control of returns and change outcomes!