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Expensive to get wrongSouth KoreaUnited StatesBeauty & personal care

Korean-origin returns have to come back sealed

Korean-origin beauty brands selling into the United States write a sealed-goods condition into their return policy and their US-origin peers do not: 14 of 18 Korean-origin policies require the product unopened or factory-sealed, against 2 of 13 US-origin ones, 6 of which say in writing that opened or gently used product can come back.

A brand porting its home returns page into the United States is asking a shopper to buy skincare they are not allowed to try, in the one market where trying it is how the category sells.

68

68 of a possible 97Tier A, primary document or measured outcome. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 97, however good it looks.

Verified September 9, 2026Rechecked every 90 days, next by December 8, 2026.

Norm

Held since August 5, 2026What is expected behaviour here. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 3.

This entry is wrong if

A repeat run finds fewer than half of Korean-origin policies requiring unopened goods, or more than a quarter of US-origin policies requiring it.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

  1. Tier Aobserved-webn = 31

    orbt: Market Register commerce collector, run commerce-20260805140548

    The items must be sealed, unused, and in the same condition that you received them.

    Verbatim from Anua’s published refund policy. Read on Shopify storefronts only, because Shopify guarantees the path and the Korean platforms each bury the same text somewhere different; 38 of the 42 brand storefronts in these two groups qualify. 5 could not be read and are excluded rather than counted as silent, 5 of them because the site’s robots.txt refuses the path, which we honour: Dear, Klairs / Necessaire / Rhode / Summer Fridays / Topicals. 2 serve a pointer to another page instead of terms and are also excluded: Bubble / Naturium. This reads what a policy says, never what a brand does at the desk: no return was observed being refused. Run commerce-20260805140548.

    Read 2026-08-05 · CC BY · page hash 9a6ccfd5ea85

History

  1. v3corrected

    Correction. The retirement recorded above was an operator error, not a finding. The derivation was run against collector run commerce-20260805053004 while that crawl was still in flight and had reached 4 of 66 storefronts, so every claim whose storefronts it had not yet read failed its sample gate and was retired. 44 claims were retired in one command for that reason. The claim was re-derived the same day from collector run commerce-20260805051110, a complete 66 of 66 crawl, and holds. Nothing about the market changed between the two records. The retirement stays in this log because the log is not edited; this entry is what it means. The instrument now refuses to derive from a run missing more than a tenth of the seeded storefronts, and a claim returning from retired now files its own status revision, which is why this correction had to be written by hand rather than appearing on its own.

  2. v2retired

    Retired against collector run commerce-20260805053004: policy reads too thin (KR 2, US 0; need 8 each). The claim held on the sample available when it was written and does not hold on this one.

    What it said before

    Korean-origin beauty brands selling into the United States write a sealed-goods condition into their return policy and their US-origin peers do not: 14 of 18 Korean-origin policies require the product unopened or factory-sealed, against 2 of 13 US-origin ones, 6 of which say in writing that opened or gently used product can come back.

  3. v1created

    Derived from collector run commerce-20260805025415.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

  • returns
  • refunds
  • policy
  • trust
  • hygiene
  • k-beauty
  • corridor
  • beauty

Cite this entry

“Korean-origin returns have to come back sealed”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:kr-us:korean-origin-return-policies-require-unopened-goods, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/kr-us--korean-origin-return-policies-require-unopened-goods. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

For a deck, a brief or a chat.

Free to quote, cite and act on. Not to resell or redistribute — the sources ask that of us, and each one’s terms are named. Machine-readable: entries.json carries this record under the id omr:kr-us:korean-origin-return-policies-require-unopened-goods, with the same evidence and falsifier.

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