Amazon Will Sell You Clothes That You Can Send Back

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 10:00PM EST · Published Jun 23, 8:10AM EDT

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Amazon Will Sell You Clothes That You Can Send Back — © Thinkstock

Amazon Prime members can now buy clothes, try them on at home and send back any they don’t like. The transaction must be expensive for Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), but it has been marching into the clothing business as aggressively as it did in books long ago, then consumer electronics and move recently streaming entertainment. Lose money in a market, undermine the competition and maybe make money in the sector later.

Prime Wardrobe is a service that further cements the relationship of Amazon to its Prime members, who number over 100 million worldwide. It gets added to streaming media, free shipping, a music service and free photo storage. Prime is critical to Amazon’s success because members shop more at Amazon than non-members do.

The try clothing before you buy offer could hardly be more enticing. Order, try on and send back what you don’t want in the same box in which Amazon sent it. There’s even a preprinted label to get it back to Jeff Bezos.

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Amazon probably can’t resell a lot of the clothing people have seven days to try on and look at. Even if it can, the clothing has to be inspected, refolded and repackaged. And there is the cost of free shipping. In theory, Amazon loses money on many of these sales. In some cases, people will send back every item.

Amazon does have to worry about the losses. They are less than a rounding error on its financials. On the other hand, the management at the likes of The Gap and J.C. Penney have one more thing to make them panic.

Even if Amazon makes very few sales, it has blitzed its way into another large market.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.