First Look Results: What Operators Really Think About Returns and Cross-Border Platforms
A quick read on the early signals from our research project.
TLDR;
The industry lacks a trustworthy benchmark for returns and cross-border tools. We’re fixing that by gathering data from the people who run the operations every day and donating £100 to charity for each respondent.
The returns and cross-border world is full of noise, but very little of it reflects the operational reality inside retail teams. Most “insight” in this space comes from vendors, not the people who spend their days managing carriers, reconciling duties, fighting spreadsheets and trying to make disparate systems talk to each other.
This research series exists to close that gap. We’re speaking directly to operators and pulling out what is actually happening inside real workflows, not what appears on a slide deck. What follows is a first read on the themes emerging. These are not conclusions, simply the points that are already starting to surface.
Who We’re Hearing From
So far, responses are coming from the types of brands that carry the majority of cross-border and returns complexity in the mid-market. Fashion and lifestyle retailers with meaningful international sales, lean teams, and the usual collection of integrations, partners and constraints that shape their day-to-day.
They are the people who feel the impact of bad data, slow support, rigid tools and last-minute policy decisions most acutely. Their experience is precisely what this benchmark is built on.
Returns: Capable Tools Inside Fragile Systems
A clear pattern is already forming. Most operators feel broadly positive about the returns platform they use, but considerably less positive about their returns setup as a whole. The difference between those two viewpoints is where the real story sits.
The friction tends to show up in familiar places: integrations that behave inconsistently across regions, international processes that never quite align with the rest of the stack, reporting that relies on multiple systems, and operational steps that should be automated but aren’t. None of this is new, but the volume of comments suggests the gap between “what the platform can do” and “what the business can execute” is widening.
Support quality is also coming through as a differentiator. Operators place more weight on responsiveness and partnership than on individual features. Vendors who work closely with teams tend to generate far more confidence than those who feel distant or process-driven.
Cross-Border: High Ambition, High Friction
Cross-border shows a similar pattern, but with more intensity. The ambition is high and the commercial opportunity is clear, yet many of the tools still feel misaligned with how modern DTC brands operate. The most common themes relate to transparency, the difficulty of understanding the true economics of international orders, limited alignment with Shopify Markets, and the level of manual work that inevitably reappears even after a platform is implemented.
Very few teams have switched cross-border providers once they’ve chosen one, but the sentiment behind that is less about satisfaction and more about the perceived difficulty and risk of moving. This is reminiscent of how the returns category felt a few years ago: significant operational frustration, but no obvious next step.
The Structural Issues Behind Both Areas
When you look at returns and cross-border together, the underlying problems are almost identical. Integration quality dictates most of the bottlenecks. Manual processes absorb far more time than teams would publicly admit. Reporting is still too fragmented to support fast, reliable decision-making. And the platforms that generate the most trust are the ones that iterate quickly and work directly with operators, not around them.
The consistency of these themes, even at this early stage, suggests the challenges are less about individual vendors and more about the shape of the ecosystem itself.
Where the Market Appears to Be Heading
The direction of travel is becoming clearer. Operators are looking for tools that align more closely with Shopify’s architecture, provide a transparent view of international economics, and reduce manual operational work. They want data they can rely on rather than dashboards they need to reconcile. And they value vendors who act as genuine partners rather than simply supplying a product.
Cost, in this context, becomes secondary. Brands are willing to pay for clarity and accountability. What creates frustration is opacity.
Why We’re Sharing This Now
These early signals are useful, but they are still early. The strength of this benchmark depends on the breadth and depth of the operators we hear from. If you work across ecommerce, operations, logistics, CX or systems, your experience is what gives this research weight. It shapes the report, the conversations that follow, and ultimately the advice brands rely on when making decisions.
The survey takes around ten minutes. Each response triggers a £100 donation to a charity you choose, and we double it if you’re open to a short follow-up conversation.
Really insightful work capturing the operator perspective on this. Your observation about the gap between "what the platform can do" and "what the business can execute" nails the fundamental chalenge with most enterprise solutions today. The integration quality bottleneck you identified is especially telling becasue it reveals how much of "lean operations" depends not on feature richness but on seamless interoperability and responsive vendor partnerships. The fact that operators are willing to pay for clarity over cost savings suggests the market is maturing past the "cheapest solution" phase into genuine operational excellence.