4 posts tagged with "customer-experience"

If you've been quietly stressing about your returns rate — the math that never quite adds up when shipping costs go one direction and customer expectations go another — you're in good company. Most stores are dealing with this. And in 2026, the industry has quietly hit a turning point.

72% of US retailers now charge some form of return fee, up sharply from just a few years ago. Among affordable luxury brands, the share charging for returns went from 4% in 2023 to 20% in 2026. Amazon introduced return fees for certain items at select locations. H&M, Zara, and other major chains followed. No retailer that introduced a return fee between 2023 and 2026 has subsequently removed it.

The era of free returns is not exactly over — but its days as the universal default are.

If you're running a loyalty program and it mostly consists of a stamp card behind the counter or a weekly email blast that goes to everyone at once — you're not alone. Most restaurants are doing exactly that. And according to fresh data from the Paytronix 2026 Loyalty Report, most restaurants are leaving a significant amount of repeat business on the table because of it.

Here's the number that should stop you mid-scroll: after just four visits, 95% of your guests come back on their own. The problem isn't getting customers to like you. It's getting them to that fourth visit before they drift away.

If you've felt the pull to just hand your whole customer support inbox to an AI chatbot and be done with it — no judgment. Handling a constant stream of shipping questions, return requests, and "where's my order" messages while also running an actual business is a lot. AI promised to absorb all of that.

Here's the honest update heading into May 2026: a lot of companies tried exactly that, and it's not going as smoothly as the press releases suggested. Some lessons are worth knowing before you go all-in.

If you run a Shopify store and missed the news from last Tuesday, here's the version that matters: Ulta Beauty turned on a feature that lets Google's Gemini AI buy products from their website on behalf of customers. Not a demo. Not a beta. Live, on April 22, 2026.

No human visited Ulta's product pages. No one clicked through a search result. An AI agent identified the right products, compared options, and completed checkout — all inside Google's interface. The customer never saw Ulta's website.

That's not a far-off prediction anymore. It happened five days ago.