The Analytics Gap Nobody Talks About

Here are four questions that most mid-market ecommerce operators should be able to answer. Most can’t.

Here are four questions that most mid-market ecommerce operators should be able to answer. Most can’t.

Are we profitable internationally, by market? What are the real return reasons by country? What’s the duties and tax impact on our margin? How much revenue are we actually retaining through exchanges?

The data to answer these questions exists. It’s sitting somewhere in your stack right now. The problem is that it’s sitting in four different systems that don’t talk to each other, reconciled by nobody, and interpreted differently depending on which team you ask.

That’s the analytics gap. And it’s one of the more quietly damaging findings in our latest research.

It comes up consistently across both returns and cross-border operations, and it matters because it’s not just a reporting inconvenience. It shapes decisions, or more accurately, it prevents them. When you can’t see international profitability by market, you can’t make intelligent decisions about where to invest, where to pull back, or where margin is leaking fastest. When you can’t reconcile exchange revenue cleanly, you can’t build a business case for improving the exchange flow. When duties and tax treatment lives outside the core systems, finance teams are always a step behind.

Our consultant Amy Washington put the buying and merchandising perspective clearly: “What you need as a buyer or merch is the qualitative feedback. To know your returns rate is high, that’s a KPI, that’s a marker of performance, but what you really need to know is why. What a buying and merch team would be looking for from a returns platform is: can we get the analytics out of what is being returned and why? That’s what’s important.”

The returns rate number is available. The why is buried in a system that doesn’t surface it cleanly, if it surfaces it at all.

The same pattern shows up on the cross-border side. Brands are running international operations with meaningful revenue in multiple markets, but their view of margin by market is either non-existent or assembled manually from sources that may or may not be consistent with each other. They know they’re profitable overall. They can’t tell you whether Germany is worth it or whether the US operation is subsidising returns costs that nobody has fully accounted for.

What operators want, when you ask them directly, isn’t more dashboards. It’s one trusted operational view. A single place where the numbers reconcile, where finance and operations are looking at the same data, and where decisions can be made with confidence rather than approximation.

That’s harder to build than it sounds. It requires integration work that most implementations don’t prioritise, reporting architecture that cuts across vendor boundaries, and a level of operational discipline that’s difficult to maintain when teams are already stretched. But it’s also the gap that matters most, because almost everything else in the operation, routing decisions, exchange strategy, market prioritisation, platform evaluation, depends on having reliable numbers underneath it.

The brands that are investing in this now, building the connective tissue between their systems and establishing a single source of truth for operational data, are building a genuine competitive advantage. Not because the technology is sophisticated, but because most of their competitors are still working from four spreadsheets and a Slack thread.

Our full research report covers the analytics gap in detail as part of a broader look at where returns and cross-border operations are failing, and where the biggest opportunities for improvement sit.