News and events

Explore the latest activities our group are involved with.

Watch this BBC: Politics South episode, in which Dr Regina Frei was invited to join BBC's Peter Henley and his guests, Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, Conservative MP for Gosport, and Olivia Bailey, Labour candidate for Reading West and Mid Berkshire, to discuss the issue of product returns.
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 "The Bottom Line" podcast on "Many unhappy returns." In this episode, Evan Davis (BBC Presenter) invited Dr Regina Frei and other guests to discuss the hidden world of returns and the mini-industry that emerged to deal with unwanted items by customers.
Dr Regina Frei discussed why some retailers have started to charge fees for online returns in an effort to reduce returns rates. Read more in "The costs and consequences of returning our purchases".

A cross-faculty team at the University of Surrey, led by Dr Regina Frei from the Department of Digital Economy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, was awarded a £20.7k grant from the Connected Everything Prize Fund to develop a Network+ proposal on the digital circular economy.
We are organising two events on "Towards a Circular Economy in Retail" as part of the 2023 Festival of Social Science.
We are organising a special session on circular business models at the International Conference on Resource Sustainability (icRS), taking place on 7-9 August at the University of Surrey
Our latest article is available online: Strategies and practices to reduce the ecological impact of product returns
Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) has awarded our group a research grant to investigate how retailers can assess circular business opportunities. This project started in April 2023
Our work is catching media attention from the following outlets: The Guardian, DeliveryX, Internet Retailing the Southern Daily Echo and the Medium.

Read our article on how retailers can combat returns policy abuse and fraud
Professor Lisa Jack discusses product returns in her blog "Who's in charge of returns?"
Woxsen University, India, invited Gina to discuss product returns for their Woxsen International Lecture Series on 12 July 2022
On 30 June 2022, Gina gave a seminar, organised by the ECS Centre for Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems, on the topic of "multichannel retail: the role of IT in managing product returns and related fraud"
Gina delivered a keynote address on modelling and forecasting product returns and related fraud at the Reverse Logistics Association's European Summit in Amsterdam, 22-23 June 2022
Our work featured in The Sunday Times
Listen to Gina discussing product returns and returns fraud with Professor Tony Hines in his podcast series Chain Reaction.
We delivered a virtual incubator session on product returns at the EurOMA Sustainability Forum on 22 March 2022.

We were awarded a research grant (2020-2022) under the UKRI's call to get funding for ideas that address Covid-19. The project was a collaboration between the Southampton Business School, the School for Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and the ECR Retail Loss Group, an association of retailers and manufacturers.

Our article, the hidden costs of online shopping – for customers and retailers in The Conversation, has been read over 70,000 times so far, picked up by over 50 Media outlets and also has been translated into Indonesian.