Inside Britain’s £6bn addiction to shopping ‘hauls’

Amber Scholl, 31, is sitting in her bedroom looking like the cat that got the cream. Or rather, the cat that won the lottery. Parcels, packets and boxes are strewn all over her bed, as well as every other spare surface of her room. It looks like a Royal Mail warehouse after a particularly long strike.

“Aah yes; just a totally normal amount of things that came in the mail,” she smiles. “This morning,” she adds, before descending into a fit of giggles. “You all know I love to shop – every day is Christmas if you buy yourself presents. Let’s open some stuff!”

For anyone who cares about their carbon footprint, Scholl’s 20 minute YouTube video is likely to make them feel more nauseous than the Norovirus. So many items has the US-based influencer bought that she can’t even remember what most of them are. That her video – an extreme example of the trend – has been viewed 710,000 times, and that her YouTube channel has 3.69 million subscribers, is further proof, if any were needed, of the vast and increasing popularity of “hauls”, a specific type of shopping habit that’s causing a headache for retailers.

According to research by Retail Economics, shopping hauls are fuelling a concerning surge in people returning online orders in the UK – to the tune of £6.6 billion of items a year. “The rise of opportunistic shopping behaviours, where many people intentionally buy large quantities of goods with the intention of returning most of them, is placing an unprecedented strain on retailers,” said Richard Lim, Retail Economics’ chief executive.

Perhaps, but these “opportunistic shopping behaviours” are emblematic of how we now shop. Social media is increasingly used as a discovery tool: where once we might have Googled “leopard print coat”, now we’ll search for the term on TikTok or Instagram. The best haul videos are informative, giving shoppers the added bonus of tips and advice from creators whom they trust.

A no-brainer for brands

Shopping hauls are hardly a new phenomenon. The trend started more than 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, largely on YouTube. Users would describe their latest clothing or beauty purchases, trying them on and assessing them for quality and fit. Videos tended to be enthusiastic and naive, featuring items genuinely purchased by the user.

Fast forward to 2024, and they’re an extremely popular and lucrative business. On TikTok, the haul hashtag appears in 16.5 million posts, and 3.6 million on Instagram. The most popular creators can be paid in the region of £10,000 for a post, though most will do it for far less, with those starting out happy to post in exchange for free clothes.

As marketing strategies go, it’s a no-brainer for brands, since it represents a low-cost way of gaining exposure. Even creators with small followings (those with under 10,000 are referred to as ‘micro influencers’) wield influence among their peers, most of whom are highly engaged. Return on investment is assiduously tracked by brands through views, and whether they convert to sales.

Channon Mooney, 26, is one of thousands of British influencers whose love of shopping hauls has turned into a business. She started posting her hauls in 2019: five years later, she has 567,000 TikTok followers and 160,500 followers on Instagram. So popular are her videos that she was approached to be a brand ambassador for the fast fashion e-tailer, PrettyLittleThing. “I used to work full time at a bank while posting on my social media [accounts] 2-3 times a day, because consistency is key if you hope to turn it into a career,” she says. “I’m fortunate enough for it to have worked out well, allowing me to commit to social media full time for the past two and a half years.”

But it’s not just Gen Z who enjoy a shopping haul: older shoppers are equally as enthusiastic. On TikTok, 50-something users such as Annamaria Kalebic (74,300 followers) and Valerie Mackey (217,000 followers) have highly engaged audiences who find their trying on of clothes inspirational and informative, as the comments left under their videos attest.

“Midlifers and millennials are fond of hauls, too – less for the volume of items and obsession with following trends, and more due to the time-poor lives they lead,” says Sarah Crawley, founder of The Good Influence, a social-first marketing agency. “With many of them keeping all the plates spinning [at work and at home], they’re likely to have deprioritised shopping at bricks-and-mortar stores in favour of the ease of an online Zara haul to try everything on at home.”

Crawley also notes that hauls are part of a wider cultural shift in how we spend our leisure time. “Over the past ten years, we’ve gone from spending our weekends shopping and browsing clothes to seeking more experience-led hobbies, or prioritising fitness. This, combined with the ease of being able to click and buy at any time of the day, has changed the way we shop.”

‘A person can get addicted’

But chartered psychologist Dr Mark Rackley cautions that shopping hauls can become addictive, whatever your age. “A person can get addicted to the behaviour of shopping online and the dopamine rush this gives them in finding an outfit,” he says. “The next hit of dopamine comes from the clothes arriving and trying them on.

“For people on social media, dopamine can also come from interaction with the comments about the outfit. If the person becomes addicted to the feelings that this process brings them, they can further become addicted by continually repeating the behaviour to chase the dopamine and feeling it produces. Dopamine is a temporary chemical reaction in the brain, so if you want to keep getting the dopamine hit, you need to keep repeating the behaviour that gives you it.”

Livvy, a 21-year-old psychology student, considers her mother, 51, to be more addicted to shopping hauls than she or any of her friends. “She’s quite open with me about how happy a Zara or Boden delivery makes her feel. When she first started posting her hauls on Instagram, I was a bit embarrassed. Nobody wants random people seeing their mum trying on a dress and doing a twirl. She doesn’t have a lot of followers, but the comments she gets under her Reels are so positive that I can see why she does it. It’s an ego boost and makes her feel better about herself.”

“Shopping can become a habit for all kinds of reasons,” notes Dr Rackley. “For some it will be about filling periods of boredom and giving them something to do. For others it will be to make them feel good and give them some focus to their day or week. The rewards for older women can be that it becomes a pastime or hobby. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t become addictive.”

‘Mindful hauling’

While they may be causing a returns headache for retailers, some believe the tide is turning.

Crawley thinks that the cost of living crisis has made most people much savvier haulers. “Many will default to the likes of Vinted as a first bet before buying new, as it’s highly likely there are brand new alternatives at knockdown prices ready to buy. I’ve started to see influencers share their Vinted hauls – Emma Guns does this on her Substack, and I love seeing what she’s discovered. I think we’ll see a lot more of this heading into 2025.”

Caroline Jones’s Instagram account, @knickers_models_own, details the 46-year-old’s daily charity shop trips in search of a second-hand outfit, a project she embarked upon in 2015 to raise money for Cancer Research UK after losing her own mother to cancer. Originally conceived as a year-long project, such was users’ interest that she kept it going, and has raised thousands of pounds. It’s another instance of hauls being used for a greater good.

For Channon Mooney, “mindful hauling” is the way forward. “I couldn’t say how much I spend on clothes per year, and I’m also lucky to get a lot of clothing gifted through my work, although I don’t rely on gifting. If there are specific items I like, I always take a while to consider if I need it first before purchasing. A successful haul video for me is when everything fits perfectly and I don’t feel like I want to return anything at all.”