The study found that the average rate of return has remained flat at 16.5% in 2022 compared with 16.6% in 2021. But as total retail sales continue to grow, that means the value of returned goods has risen apace, and is now on track to hit $816 billion this year.
That is a problem because for every $100 in returned merchandise accepted, retailers lose $10.40 to return fraud, NRF and Appriss said. Of the types of return fraud retailers say they have experienced in the past year, half (50%) cited returns of used, non-defective merchandise, also known as wardrobing, and 41.4% cited the return of shoplifted or stolen merchandise. One-fifth (20%) attributed return fraud to organized retail crime.
Those statistics also showed that online return rates have fallen are now consistent with the overall rate of return, for the first time since online data has been captured as part of the survey in 2019. Online return rates decreased from 20.8% in 2021 to 16.5% in 2022.
Despite those challenges, retailers continue to allow customer returns, seeing the practice as a way to encourage customer loyalty. “Even with 29 continuous months of retail sales growth, consumers have remained steady with the overall rate of merchandise returned to retailers this year,” Mark Mathews, NRF’s vice president of research development and industry analysis, said in a release. “While oftentimes returns represent a lost sale for a retail establishment, returns can also provide recourse through positive customer engagement and, potentially, another purchase.”
The San Francisco tech startup Vooma has raised $16 million in venture funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed for freight brokers and carriers, the company said today.
The backing came from a $13 million boost in “series A” funding led by Craft Ventures, which followed an earlier seed round of $3.6 million led by Index Ventures with participation from angel investors including founders and executives from major logistics and technology companies such as Motive, Project44, Ryder, and Uber Freight.
Founded in 2023, the firm has built “Vooma Agents,” which it calls a multi-channel AI platform for logistics. The system uses various agents to operate across email, text and voice channels, allowing for automation in workflows that were previously unaddressable by existing systems. According to Vooma, its platform lets logistics companies scale up their operations by reducing time spent on tedious and manual work and creating space to solve real logistical challenges, while also investing in critical relationships.
The company’s solutions include: Vooma Quote, which identifies quotes and drafts email responses, Vooma Build, a data-entry assistant for load building, and Vooma Voice, which can make and receive calls for brokers and carriers. Additional options are: Vooma Insights and the future releases of Vooma Agent and Vooma Schedule.
“The United States moves approximately 11.5 billion tons of truckloads annually, and moving freight from point A to B requires hundreds of touchpoints between shippers, brokers and carriers,” Vooma co-founder, who is the former CEO of ASG LogisTech, said in a release. “By introducing AI that fits naturally into existing systems, workflows and communication channels used across the industry, we are meaningfully reducing the tasks people dislike and freeing up their time and headspace for more meaningful and complex challenges.”
The new funding brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining the e-commerce giant’s position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic. The partnership was launched in 2023, when Amazon invested its first $4 billion round in the firm.
Anthropic’s “Claude” family of AI assistant models is available on AWS’s Amazon Bedrock, which is a cloud-based managed service that lets companies build specialized generative AI applications by choosing from an array of foundation models (FMs) developed by AI providers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon itself.
According to Amazon, tens of thousands of customers, from startups to enterprises and government institutions, are currently running their generative AI workloads using Anthropic’s models in the AWS cloud. Those GenAI tools are powering tasks such as customer service chatbots, coding assistants, translation applications, drug discovery, engineering design, and complex business processes.
"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," Matt Garman, AWS CEO, said in a release. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration."
The Dutch ship building company Concordia Damen has worked with four partner firms to build two specialized vessels that will serve the offshore wind industry by transporting large, and ever growing, wind turbine components, the company said today.
The first ship, Rotra Horizon, launched yesterday at Jiangsu Zhenjiang Shipyard, and its sister ship, Rotra Futura, is expected to be delivered to client Amasus in 2025. The project involved a five-way collaboration between Concordia Damen and Amasus, deugro Danmark, Siemens Gamesa, and DEKC Maritime.
The design of the 550-foot Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon builds on the previous vessels Rotra Mare and Rotra Vente, which were also developed by Concordia Damen, and have been operating since 2016. However, the new vessels are equipped for the latest generation of wind turbine components, which are becoming larger and heavier. They can handle that increased load with a Roll-On/Roll-Off (RO/RO) design, specialized ramps, and three Liebherr cranes, allowing turbine blades to be stowed in three tiers, providing greater flexibility in loading methods and cargo configurations.
“For the Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon, we, along with our partners, have focused extensively on energy savings and an environmentally friendly design,” Concordia Damen Managing Director Chris Kornet said in a release. “The aerodynamic and hydro-optimized hull design, combined with a special low-resistance coating, contributes to lower fuel consumption. Furthermore, the vessels are equipped with an advanced Wärtsilä main engine, which consumes 15 percent less fuel and has a smaller CO₂ emission footprint than current standards.”
Specifically, loaded import volume rose 11.2% in October 2024, compared to October 2023, as port operators processed 81,498 TEUs (twenty-foot containers), versus 73,281 TEUs in 2023, the port said today.
“Overall, the Port’s loaded import cargo is trending towards its pre-pandemic level,” Port of Oakland Maritime Director Bryan Brandes said in a release. “This steady increase in import volume in 2024 is an encouraging trend. We are also seeing a rise in US agricultural exports through Oakland. Thanks to refrigerated warehousing on Port property near the maritime terminals and convenient truck and rail access, we are well-positioned to continue to grow ag export cargo volume through the Oakland Seaport.”
Looking deeper into its October statistics, loaded exports declined 3.4%, registering 66,649 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 68,974 TEUs in October 2023. Despite that slight decline, the category has grown 6.7% between January and October 2024 compared to the same period last year.
In fact, Oakland’s exports have been declining over the past decade, a long-term trend that is largely due to the reduction in demand for recycled paper exports. However, agricultural exports have made up for some of the export losses from paper, the port said.
For the fourth quarter, empty exports bumped up 30.6%. Port operators processed 29,750 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 22,775 TEUs in October 2023. And empty imports increased 15.3%, with 15,682 TEUs transiting Port facilities in October 2024, in contrast to 13,597 TEUs in October 2023.
A growing number of organizations are identifying ways to use GenAI to streamline their operations and accelerate innovation, using that new automation and efficiency to cut costs, carry out tasks faster and more accurately, and foster the creation of new products and services for additional revenue streams. That was the conclusion from ISG’s “2024 ISG Provider Lens global Generative AI Services” report.
The most rapid development of enterprise GenAI projects today is happening on text-based applications, primarily due to relatively simple interfaces, rapid ROI, and broad usefulness. Companies have been especially aggressive in implementing chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), which can provide personalized assistance, customer support, and automated communication on a massive scale, ISG said.
However, most organizations have yet to tap GenAI’s potential for applications based on images, audio, video and data, the report says. Multimodal GenAI is still evolving toward mainstream adoption, but use cases are rapidly emerging, and with ongoing advances in neural networks and deep learning, they are expected to become highly integrated and sophisticated soon.
Future GenAI projects will also be more customized, as the sector sees a major shift from fine-tuning of LLMs to smaller models that serve specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, ISG says. Enterprises and service providers increasingly recognize that customized, domain-specific AI models offer significant advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and performance. Customized GenAI can also deliver on demands like the need for privacy and security, specialization of tasks, and integration of AI into existing operations.