International by Default
Most mid-market ecommerce brands are already global. Their operating models aren’t.
We’ve just published our first research report. We spoke to operators at fast-growing brands:
mostly fashion
mostly UK-headquartered
mostly between £10m and £100m
and asked questions about returns, cross-border, margin visibility
and the gap between what tools promise and what teams actually experience
We expected to find brands at various stages of deliberate international expansion. What we actually found: international revenue has already arrived, and for most it wasn’t a carefully thought out strategy.
67% of the cohort reported 30%+ of revenue from international sales. Six brands sat between 70% and 90%+. These aren’t global enterprises with regional teams. They’re operators with domestic systems and workflows scaling beyond a single market.
The growth is real. The margin pressure that follows is also real.
What the report covers
The full report goes deep across six areas. Here’s enough to frame the conversation, not enough to replace reading it.
Returns tooling has improved dramatically. Returns operations haven’t. The gap between “I like my platform” and “I trust my setup” is where the margin leaks live.
16 of 24 brands have switched returns platforms at least once, and the triggers are rarely about the tool itself.
Cross-border remains the problem everyone tolerates. Universal frustration, almost zero switching. The report explores whether that’s about to change.
And underneath all of it: the same integration pain, manual workarounds, and analytics gaps showing up in every conversation regardless of category or vendor.
Why now
Tighter margins, rising logistics costs, and sharper finance scrutiny are making previously tolerated leakage harder to ignore. The window where international complexity could be treated as a future problem has closed.
The report maps where that pressure is showing up, and what operators are actually doing about it.
Independent research. No vendor sponsorship. First in an ongoing series. If you’d like to participate or just tell us we’ve got something wrong: research@commercethinking.com