Our recent survey of nearly 20,000 Consumer Reports subscribers revealed many tips for buying a mattress. Some work better than others, including these five: 1. Vote With Your Feet If you walk through a store and find that everything attractive is priced through the roof, follow our subscribers’ lead and go elsewhere. Price was the biggest single reason subscribers decided against buying a mattress and left for another store, especially when they were shopping for a mattress at a Sleep Number store. Another big deterrent was lack of selection—either limited display models or few brands or models to choose from. This was particularly true at warehouse-club stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club. 2. Showroom Before You Shop Showrooming—looking at a product in a brick-and-mortar store but buying online, typically from another retailer—is growing more common, including for mattress shopping; 16 percent of online shoppers we surveyed showroomed before buying a mattress.
While showrooming seemed to help some mattress shoppers, it didn’t generally lead to higher satisfaction with what our subscribers ended up buying. Part of this could be because looking for a given mattress at a different seller might not lead to the purchase of the exact mattress they saw. Many models are sold only at a specific retailer, despite what salespeople say about a mattress in their store being the same as one you saw elsewhere. Mattress prices range widely—the beds in our mattress Ratings cost $248 to $7,595. We can't tell you what to spend, but we can help you find the right bed. Before you shop, check our exclusive brand and retailer Ratings, use our mattress buying guide, and review our Ratings of almost 60 innerspring, foam, and adjustable-air mattresses. 3. Try Before You Buy Although we recommend you spend at least 15 minutes lying on a mattress before deciding to buy it, only 16 percent of in-store shoppers spend that long testing it, even at retailers that encourage the practice.
Indeed, most shoppers we surveyed lie on their mattresses in the stores for five minutes or less, if at all. The duration varied from store to store. For businesses that have few or no showrooms (such as online sellers) or display mattresses standing up (warehouse clubs), trying out the mattress is not an option. But although past subscriber surveys have told us that trying out a mattress before buying increases the chances of being satisfied with the purchase, this time that wasn’t necessarily the case. In-store customers who didn’t test mattresses at all before buying also reported high mattress-satisfaction rates. For brands that rated highest in our mattress-brands Ratings, trying out the mattress before buying was perhaps less important because shoppers may have trust in those brands. 4. Haggle—It Pays Off You can’t haggle everywhere you shop for a mattress, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s possible to negotiate a lower price while buying a mattress online.
Shoppers we surveyed met the most success at mattress-specialty stores such as Mattress Firm, Mattress Warehouse, Mattress King, Sleep Train and Sleepy’s. Most shoppers who did try to haggle were successful, saving a median of $205 on their purchases. 5. Ask About Any and All Freebies Shoppers in our survey usually got something for free with their mattress purchase. While typically this was delivery or haul-away service, or sometimes both, some buyers also got a free mattress protector or bed frame. Free delivery alone was more common for online sales. Shoppers should be aware, however, that retailers that make such offers typically charge higher prices for their mattresses. So find out how much these additions would cost out-of-pocket before deciding where to buy your next mattress. Would you buy a mattress you can't try? Tell us about it below.Return policies are offered by retailers to help reduce customer risk and act as an incentive for product purchase.
Post purchase, if the consumer changes their mind, then the product goes back, the cost for which is often borne by the retailer. Anecdotal evidence suggests that return rates in excess of 20% can be enough to wipe out a retailer’s operating profit, which makes retailers cautious about offering a lenient return policy to help stimulate customer demand. In fact, retailers often choose to offer return policies with checks and balances, ones that include some lenient terms but with restrictions as well. In a recent paper in the Journal of Retailing, we identify five common factors that are varied in return policies to make them more or less lenient. Monetary Leniency: How much of the price of purchase is refunded Time Leniency: The duration within which returns are accepted Effort Leniency: How hard it is for consumers to return the item Exchange Leniency: Whether refunds come in the form of store credit or cash Scope Leniency: The scope of products that can be returned — for instance, whether discounted items are included or not
The good news from our research is that offering a lenient return policy can increase the number of items purchased more than it increases the number of items returned. However, increasing purchases via a more lenient return policy does lead to higher returns, and the exact impact depends on the policy. Some aspects of a return policy affect purchases more than returns, while others affect returns more than purchases. We find that offering to refund the full price of the product (monetary leniency) or making returns easier (effort leniency) work best in getting consumers to purchase the product. If, on the other hand, the focus is on trying to reduce the number of returns, then offering more time and not accepting returns on discounted items is more effective. Further, since the money returned back to the customer is often less than the full amount paid by the customer, store credit paid in full triggers more returns than cash payments paid in part. But what type of return policies do retailers actually choose in the real world?
To learn more about this, we conducted an analysis of the return policies of 79 U.S. retailers that publish their policies online. We found that the most common form of restriction was monetary, meaning limits on how much money you could get back as a refund. Second most common were effort-based descriptions like asking customers to retain receipts or fill out a form for return. The average deadline across stores for returns was 57 days. The average restocking fee – a fee on returns that counts against the amount the consumer gets back — was 14%. And 93% of the firms did not offer refunds on shipping costs. Finally, stores that sold durable products imposed more monetary and effort restrictions than stores than sold non-durable products. Can retailers do better? Below we offer six strategies that a retailer can use to selectively offer leniency in order to increase purchases while also reducing returns. Be selectively lenient based on cause of the return. For example, Gap has a return policy of forty-five days for any exchange, but offers an unrestricted return policy for all defective products.
Be selectively lenient based on time. Niemen Marcus offers 100% money back for returns less than 60 days after purchase, 75% back for 60 to 120 days after purchase, and so on. Be selectively lenient for cheaper products that need a quality prop. Allowing private label brands to have “double-your-money-back” might increase quality perceptions of the brand, since lenient return policies not only reduce risk perceptions but also act as signals of quality. Be selectively lenient for your more important customers. Sam’s Club requires a receipt (an effort-based restriction) for non-members, but not for its members. Start the return policy later so the “endowment effect” kicks in. Force a product trial window that softens the effect of buyer’s remorse (the regret we feel after we make a purchase) by helping build a sense of ownership, or endowment effect, which increases with the duration of ownership. One way to implement this might be accepting no returns for the first 15 days, and beyond that allowing a 15-day window for returns.