Finnish retailer Verkkokauppa.fi has recently taken the unprecedented step of publishing the return and service rates for the products it sells.

Verkkokauppa.fi is a large and well established online retailer with 230 million euros turnover and over 400 employees, and only post the statistics for products they have gathered enough data for.

The results would astound hangers-on of people like Tomi Ahonen who makes claims such as “Lumia is having Nokia’s biggest return rates ever seen!!!” or that the phones are “being rejected by consumers and witnessing Nokia’s biggest return rates ever.”

According to the objective 3rd party stats from retailers this is the real situation:

Return rate (% of sales) iPhone 5 32GB – White 7.91 Samsung Galaxy S 4 – White 2.31 Nokia Lumia 920 – White 0.89 Nokia Lumia 720 0.62 Nokia Lumia 620 0.38

The return rate varies by colour, hence choosing the white handsets only, but in general Lumias have a much lower return rate than high end handsets by other OEMs.

The data does however reveal and confirm another rumour – that Lumias have a high repair rate – something we have posted on before. Compared to 0.74% of iPhone 5’s needing repairs and 1.39% of SGS4 handsets, 1.79% of Nokia Lumia 920 handsets need to be repaired. This number was also consistently higher for Lumias than other handsets, indicating that Nokia does really need to work on quality control.

However, this is not the message of the post. The data confirms once again that Windows Phone users are happy with their handsets, which should give retailers confidence in selling them and Windows Phone users confidence in recommending them to others.

Via NokiaGadgets.com