Will bringing their online purchases back to a physical returns counter make shoppers happier about the shopping process, and maybe cause them to buy things at an actual mall? A startup called HappyReturns hopes so, hoping to work with a variety of online retailers to collect their stuff at malls without having to pay for return shipping. Will it save shoppers work? Not necessarily, and they might actually shop at the mall.

The more appealing part of this is for merchants, who could simply direct customers to a local HappyReturns counter. The problem with this model at the moment: there’s only one counter at the moment, at Santa Monica Place in California.

“They simply hand us the item, tells us their email address and the reason for the return, and we take care of the rest,” one of the founders explained to ECommerceBytes, a site for online sellers.

The process is supposed to be easier on shoppers, who wouldn’t have to pack up their purchases or bring them to a shipper, but who would need to plan a trip to the mall.

The catch is that for this process to work, the whole concept needs to scale up by a lot: the founders say that for the idea to make financial sense for a retailer, it would need to send “a few hundred” returns to the service’s counters every month.

Online Returns Provide a Reason to Go to the Mall [ECommerceBytes]

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