Returns and cross-border are treated as separate problems inside most ecommerce businesses. Different vendors, different budget lines, different teams owning them. In some organisations they barely share a meeting agenda.
But when they break, they break in exactly the same places.
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That’s one of the more useful findings from our latest research, and it’s worth unpacking because it changes how you diagnose operational problems and where you look for the fix.
Most ecommerce stacks are layered. And the layers don’t fail evenly.
At the surface is what customers see: checkout flows, returns portals, localised pricing, branded experience. These layers tend to work well. They’re visible, well-supported, and heavily optimised for conversion and customer satisfaction. When brands invest in new tools, this is usually where the improvement shows up.
Beneath that sits the logic layer: rules, policies, routing decisions, market configurations, exchange logic, exceptions. This is where complexity starts to compound. Edge cases become day-to-day reality. And the assumptions baked into the platform start to show their age.
Underneath both is the operational core: inventory accuracy, landed cost, duties and tax treatment, margin attribution, financial reconciliation. This layer is the hardest to see, the hardest to change, and the least forgiving when something goes wrong.
When brands add new tools, they usually improve the top layer. When they scale internationally, the strain shows up in the layers below.
The friction points our research surfaced were identical across both returns and cross-border: ERP connections requiring manual reconciliation, WMS integrations that don’t reflect real-time inventory, OMS workflows creating duplicate orders or missing data, Shopify Markets configurations that don’t align with operational reality. It doesn’t matter which part of the operation you’re talking about. The failure mode is the same.
And then there are the workarounds.
Every brand we spoke to has at least one spreadsheet, one Slack channel, or one person who just knows how to fix the thing that should work automatically.
As our co-founder Andy Slater put it: “Every brand has temporary fixes that eventually became permanent. You’ll find that last Black Friday something broke, so a plaster got applied to make it work, and then that plaster just becomes part of the business. No one questions it, no one documents it, and it only surfaces again when something else breaks or the one person who built it leaves.”
That’s not a technology failure. It’s an organisational one. And it’s almost impossible to see from the outside, or even from the inside, until something forces it into view.
The reason this framing matters is that it shifts where you look when something isn’t working. If returns feels broken, the instinct is to evaluate returns platforms. If cross-border margin is leaking, the instinct is to interrogate the cross-border provider. Sometimes that’s the right call. But more often, the problem is in the connective tissue: the integrations, the routing logic, the manual processes that have hardened into infrastructure.
Fixing a layer-one problem when the failure is in layer three doesn’t solve anything. It just gives you a better-looking surface on top of a fragile foundation.
Our full research report maps this in detail across both returns and cross-border operations, including where the shared failure points show up most consistently.
