SHORT-TERM CALCULATION OF ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY OF RETAIL REVERSE LOGISTICS SYSTEMS
The current market environment of retail trade enterprises indicates the need for accounting and management of reverse logistics, regardless of the size of the retailer. In 2020, only in the United States, retailers` losses from product returns amounted to about 400 billion dollars. More liberal return policies and a growing online sales market lead to more returned products and an increase in the volume of losses from returns, and it seems possible to believe that these trends will continue in the coming years, which indicates the need for retailers to have a way to assess the economical effectiveness of their systematic interaction with return flows in order to make management decisions on an objective and reliable information basis.
Keywords: retail, reverse logistics, economic efficiency, retail trade.
Highlights:
♦ the concept of a critical point of return is proposed, which determines the situation where a retailer needs a reverse logistics system;
♦ the need for retailers to evaluate reverse logistics in order to maintain a competitive advantage in the current market conditions is determined;
♦ an NPV-based framework is considered as a way to calculate the economic efficiency of reverse logistics systems.
Ruslan M. Beysenbaev, Post-graduate student of the Ural State University of Economics, Yekaterinburg.