Case Study: The Warehouse Group achieves reduced return fraud and improved customer loyalty with Elastic

The Warehouse Group Building Customer Loyalty and Combating Fraud

The Warehouse Group, a major New Zealand retailer with over 250 stores and about 2 million weekly visitors, faced rising return fraud and poor customer experience under its generous 12-month, no‑receipt returns policy. Store staff could only search local records and return lookups could take up to 15 minutes, creating friction for customers and exposing the business to fraudulent repeat returns.

A developer-led project deployed the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch Service, Kibana, Elastic Security) to index 3B+ transactions and equip 1,500 POS and 200 service devices with instant search. The cloud-hosted solution delivered sub-second (20–30 ms) lookups, scaled easily during peak seasons with Elastic support, eliminated much return fraud, sped up service, saved money, and enabled new use cases like in-app receipt scanning and operational analytics.

The Warehouse Group

Trevor Jones

Lead Developer