I'm going to completely disagree especially when it comes to apparel. Online shopping is a disaster for the category as it encourages the customer to buy far and away above what is needed, buy in multiple sizes, etc. And then the website gets the sale while the store eats the return. The impact is massive unless the chain makes some sort of model where the store doesn't take the hit for the return and isn't stuck with the inventory, but that is increasingly unlikely since many retailers are having vendors ship direct or the store ships (labor intensive) and then the store eats the returns. Even if the store got credit for the sale the labor usually wipes out the margin if all but one or two pieces of that big sale are returned.
I have seen where a store spends hours pulling dozens and dozens of colors of certain items only for the customer to sometimes take the order to their car, look at the items in the light or with whatever they want to match it up to, and then walk right back in and return all but one or two pieces. My favorite is when they place these orders for dozens of pieces from the parking lot and then call a minute later asking if their order can be picked up in the next few minutes because they're in a hurry; the store hasn't even received the order yet and obviously can't walk the aisles for her for free at the speed of light. They spent 10+ hours of the store's labor on this circular transaction when they could have walked in with whatever outfit they were trying to accessorize and match up right in the aisle then pay for the one piece that is less than $10 and leave. The store lost a couple of hundred dollars in labor for this $10 sale. I have fielded complaints from these customers who cost the company money and they do not care about the havoc they wreak "because you're such a big company you can afford to shop for me." I had a customer order twenty colors of plain T-shirts in every size and then they kept one of each color and returned the hundreds of others. They said they wanted to make sure they had what would fit each person, apparently it was for a class production where they could have just asked everyone up front what size they wear but instead they ordered from XS to XXXL and then returned nearly everything. Once again I would have been better off if they never bought anything. Worse, many of the shirts were apparently tried on even though we were told they weren't and at first it didn't appear to have wear until we found makeup stains primarily inside the collar area (from when they were tried on and pulled over the head/face area). Now we had to damage out dozens of shirts that could not be returned to stock.
As labor costs keep going up these ridiculous scenarios have to be stopped or the entire venture becomes unprofitable quickly. For those who say that I'm only promoting extremes, you're partially right, but it doesn't take very many of these bad shoppers with the mega orders that all get returned to destroy the profitability of a store. Two of the stores I ran until a couple of years ago have since closed and they were in low shrink areas - the high percentage of online transactions and big returns of not-on-program online only items pushed them into the red so their doors were closed at lease renewal. It only takes a couple percent of your customers to literally wipe out the slim operating margin of the entire store even worse than big shoplifting does.