As much as you may hate the hassle of returning unwanted items, it’s a sure bet retailers hate it more. After all, dealing with a return is rarely as simple as placing the item back on a store shelf. In the majority of cases, a return kicks off a long and complex journey that may include inspection, sorting, tracking, reshipping, and determining the final disposition of the item, to name just a few of the steps. All this, of course, creates extra work and additional costs.
Adding to retailers’ pain, returns are only growing as e-commerce sales continue to surge. According to U.S. Census Bureau data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, e-commerce retail sales as a percentage of total retail sales nearly doubled in the last decade, rising from 7.2% in the third quarter of 2015 to 16.4% in the third quarter of 2025. And items ordered online tend to come back more often than those bought in stores: In an October 2024 study, the National Retail Federation reported that retailers’ online return rates were, on average, 21% higher than their overall return rates.
Then there’s the environmental cost. Sadly, a large number of returned items wind up in landfills. They are simply too complicated or expensive to process or repair to make it worth restoring them to inventory.
That’s where Disney Petit and LiquiDonate come in. Petit is the founder and CEO of this sustainability-focused software company that matches excess inventory from retailers, brands, and businesses with nonprofits and schools that can use those products.
Prior to founding LiquiDonate, Petit was the head of social impact at Postmates, an online delivery platform for food and other local goods, where she focused on last-mile delivery logistics. During her time at Postmates, Petit headed a team that partnered with the technology incubator Not Impossible Labs to create a text-messaging service called Bento that connected food-insecure people with prepaid meals at local restaurants. Bento was later recognized as one of Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2021. Last year, LiquiDonate was named to Time’s Best Inventions list as well.
Petit received her bachelor’s degree in organizational communication from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and her MBA in sustainable social impact from Saybrook University in Pasadena, California. Ahead of Earth Day, she discussed how her company helps retailers reduce waste with DC Velocity Group Editorial Director David Maloney.
Disney Petit, founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, a sustainability-focused software company
Q: How extensive is the problem retailers currently face with customer returns?
A: For anyone who works in warehousing, distribution, or reverse logistics, this is a problem that shows up every day. Returns have quickly, but quietly, become one of retail’s largest operational and cost challenges. According to the National Retail Federation’s annual retail returns research, about 20% to 30% of products purchased through e-commerce are returned, and in categories like apparel, the percentages are even higher.
The issue isn’t just the volume, though. It’s also that reverse logistics wasn’t built for this scale. Most distribution centers are designed for forward velocity, not for grading, sorting, and repackaging or redistributing millions of potentially low-value items. These operations teams are constantly forced to choose between clogging their DCs with this flow or disposing of the products to keep the [process moving]. And it’s just been really difficult for retailers to keep up with the volume, especially as e-commerce continues to grow.
Q: We know that returns come back to DCs in a variety of conditions. Some are still in the original packaging and haven’t been opened, while others are damaged, defective, or, at the very least, require repackaging. How much of what is returned can really be put back into inventory for resale?
A: It really depends on the product. An item is considered resellable if [it could potentially be resold] in the same condition it came back in. But you also have to consider that once you factor in things like freight, labor, space, and handling, it costs between $15 and $35 to process a single return. So it just doesn’t make a lot of sense for some of these products to be resold. In those cases, the only appropriate path right now is really disposal—sending them to a landfill or incineration site, and sometimes they call that “recycling.” But what’s really happening is that we’re just filling landfills with these goods.
If you think about what it takes to repackage or re-tag a shirt, and it was a low-price, low-volume item to begin with, then it doesn’t make sense to resell it. I think it surprises most people that up to 70% or 80% of these unsellable returns actually end up in landfills.
Q: That is a very big number. And that’s where your organization comes in. Can you explain what prompted you to start LiquiDonate, and what you do as an organization?
A: Well, LiquiDonate is really personal for me. Before founding LiquiDonate, I spent 10 years as the 15th employee at Postmates. We were dealing with “last-mile delivery logistics” as we know it today. While I was there, I built a number of different products. One of them, called Food Fight!, was created to match surplus food from our restaurant clients with shelters in 700 cities across the U.S.
And from matching food, which is one of the most difficult items to match and move in a timely manner, I realized that there was an even bigger need in the retail space. Retail returns, excess inventory, overstock, misprints … all of these items were ending up in a landfill. I knew that there were a lot of nonprofits and other organizations out there that would be able to repurpose and reuse these goods. And it could be done without cannibalizing sales to potential full-price customers the way a lot of resale platforms do. After Postmates was acquired by Uber, I decided to start LiquiDonate, because at that point, we’d done a lot of work in the food-recovery space and I thought, why not take the technology into the retail space and help solve this returns crisis?
Q: Traditionally, returned products are handled in a number of ways. Sometimes they’re sold off to odd-lot resellers or discounters. Other times they’re shipped to distant processing centers, where in all likelihood they’ll simply be disposed of. Can you talk about the problems associated with these return practices?
A: The ways that returns are handled now are completely inefficient. Whether you go online to make a return or go into a store, there are a number of problems that come up for the retailer once you really start digging into the system. Let’s take a customer who’s making an in-store return, for example. Chances are, that customer will come in to make the return on a weekend or another busy period when speedy processing is a priority. In those cases, the store associate isn’t going to take the time to find out why the item is being returned or whether there’s something else they could recommend to that customer. Instead, it’s about completing the transaction as quickly as possible.
There’s even less information for an online return, and they usually come with additional cost. A lot of retailers are leaning into just exchanging the product for the customer. But once again, that’s additional cost, as you’re paying for a shipping label for that product to go back to a warehouse that’s hundreds or maybe thousands of miles away from the original consumer. You’re also now paying for another product to be shipped from a warehouse to that consumer. The behemoths of the retail world have [trained consumers to expect free returns and free shipping], which means that retailers are seeing their costs just balloon on a return. But in reality, there are a lot of opportunities there to make the return a more seamless, streamlined, and efficient process by using a service like LiquiDonate.
Q: Would you describe your solution as an alternative to sending these returned goods to landfills?
A: Absolutely. We’ve built a software platform that enables retailers to donate all of their excess and unsellable inventory, including returns, to local nonprofits and schools, instead of having that return travel hundreds or thousands of miles back to a warehouse.
There are several reasons that a retailer won’t want an item back. The product might not be worth that $15 to $35 on average that it would cost the retailer to take it back. The item may already be on clearance, or maybe the retailer doesn’t want anything that costs less than $15 sent back to the warehouse, or maybe it’s simply that the tag was removed. All of those reasons can be implemented into our software. So instead of producing a shipping label to a distant warehouse where the item is just going to be disposed of, our software is able to instantly produce a shipping label for a nonprofit within about 30 miles of that customer’s home, anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. The item would then go to a nonprofit that actually wants the item.
We are exclusively a non-resale platform, so these nonprofits that are receiving [returned items] are using the products for direct service. And then on the back end, our software completely automates the tax receipt process so that the retailers’ accounting teams do not have to chase down paper receipts. On average, we’re bringing down the cost of the shipping labels by 60%, and we’re reducing the transit distance by up to 90%. So there are some real environmental benefits and cost savings for the retailers that are using our service.
Q: So instead of sending the product back to the vendor, a consumer looking to make a return would be instructed to send it directly to the nonprofit using the label you supply? Is that correct?
A: Exactly, and the customer doesn’t have any idea that there was a different process happening [behind the scenes]. That is something that we know is really important for retailers. It has to be just as easy or easier for the consumer to make the return, and so we made sure that was part of the process.
Q: Is the consumer aware that they’re sending it to a nonprofit instead of the original seller?
A: No, not necessarily. The retailer can choose to “white label” the software, or they can choose to have unicorns and confetti fly across the screen with a message thanking you for your donation. It’s really up to the retailer to decide if they’re going to use this as a marketing tactic or not.
Q: I imagine some companies would consider it good public relations to show they are helping others with the donation. What are some of the other benefits for retailers and consumers?
A: Well, just thinking about the marketing aspect, we all know that Gen Z and some younger consumers really care a lot about this. And maybe because they know their product is being donated to a nonprofit, the consumer packs it with a little extra care or sends it a bit more expeditiously than they might have done otherwise. So there are a few benefits of the feel-good aspect.
But then outside of that, we’re doing some significant landfill diversion. In the last four years, we’ve diverted over 12 million items that otherwise would have ended up in the trash.
And then, of course, there are cost savings. The retailers are saving money on the shipping label and saving on the transit distance. That may even allow retailers to change the amount of carbon offsets they buy on an annual basis because they’re reducing the transit distance so much.
Q: And the retailer is also credited with making a donation for tax purposes?
A: Yes, absolutely. The tax receipt piece of what we do makes accounting teams our best friends.
Q: Disney, LiquiDonate was recognized by Time magazine as one of the “Best Inventions of 2025.” Can you tell us about that honor?
A: Being named one of Time’s “Best Inventions” was incredibly validating, not just personally, but for the operators that we work with. It confirmed that LiquiDonate isn’t just a feel-good idea, but rather a logistics infrastructure that the industry had been missing. It has helped move the conversation from being something that’s nice to have to something that is necessary to have.
Q: It is a great idea for both retailers and consumers, and of course, for the nonprofits that benefit from it. So how can retailers and nonprofits find out more about your ReturnsDirect solution?
A: Retailers that are on Shopify can install our app and begin rerouting their eligible returns the same day they install it. For enterprise retailers, we typically run 30-day pilots that integrate our existing returns solution into their OMS [order management system], their ERP [enterprise resource planning system], or their warehouse workflow without disrupting their operations.
And nonprofits are vetted so that they only receive what they can actually use, which keeps the system efficient on an end-to-end basis. To sign up, they can simply go to our website, www.liquidonate.com, and go to the Nonprofit Hub section.
