Collaboration is key to tackling retail losses of £3.4 billion

The Retail Fraud Study, an extensive research project that worked directly with 100 of the UK’s top retailers, found that losses in the UK retail sector had increased by 10% totalling £3.4 billion. However, retailers remained reluctant to collaborate with each other to reduce losses, with 22% of retailers believing collaboration is not necessary to combat retail theft and fraud.

Paul Bessant, Managing Director of Retail Knowledge who facilitated the study, commented: “It comes as quite a surprise that despite seeing such a steep rise in retail losses that retailers don’t want to collaborate in order to tackle the issues the industry faces. In a tough period of trading where retailers are having to reduce spending on things such as loss prevention collaboration would provide a relatively cost effective method of reducing losses, which last year equated to 1% of sales – nearly matching profits which equalled 1.7% of sales.”

With losses increasing as a result of theft and fraud, and retailers reducing spend on loss prevention it seems astonishing that they remain reluctant to collaborate with each other. James Harris, Commercial Director at Volumatic the UK's leading manufacturer of intelligent cash handling equipment, speaks to retailers on a daily basis. He believes that a proportion of retailers are afraid of losing a competitive edge and those that do want to collaborate are hampered in their attempts to collaborate by data protection legislation.

Read the full story from RFPConnect.co.uk, here

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