ABSTRACT
Customers return products with which they are not satised, items that are defective or damaged, items that were leased, and items whose evaluations are complete. The concept of reuse, in order to reduce waste, has produced an opportunity for material ow from the users back to the manufacturers. The management of this material ow in the opposite direction of the conventional supply chain ow is dened as reverse logistics or reverse supply chain management (Stock 1992). The term reverse supply chain encompasses all the activities involved in collecting used products from consumers and distributing them to the upstream supply chain (recycling centers, manufacturers) for reprocessing them to either recover their leftover market value or to dispose of them (Pochampally et al. 2009). If returned products are not handled efciently, then manufacturers will incur larger costs, and this could increase the cost of the nal product (Mutha and Pokharel 2009). Commercial returns are the products returned by consumers in the initial period after the purchase, say, within 90 days. The annual estimate of such commercial returns in the United States is more than $100 billion due to the presence of liberal policies that facilitate easy return of used goods by consumers. In this chapter, we primarily focus on these types of returns.
