Your Brand Is Already International
Your Operations Aren’t
Nobody planned this.
That’s the thing that keeps coming up when you talk to mid-market ecommerce operators about international revenue. There was no board-level decision, no market entry strategy, no dedicated team assembled to manage cross-border complexity. There was a product that went viral in Germany. A TikTok that landed in the US. A marketplace that opened up in France. And then, somewhere between the excitement of the numbers and the reality of the fulfilment queue, 40% of orders were shipping overseas.
The growth was real. The infrastructure to support it was not.
In our latest research, 71% of brands reported that 30% or more of their revenue comes from international sales. At the sharper end, six brands sat between 70% and 90% international. These aren’t global enterprises with regional teams and dedicated localisation budgets. They’re mid-market operators, often with lean teams, domestic systems, and workflows that were designed for a single market.
The phrase that keeps coming back is this: technically global, operationally domestic.
It’s a useful way to think about where a lot of brands currently sit. The revenue is international. The returns logic, the customer service setup, the finance reconciliation, the carrier relationships, the duties handling: mostly not. And for a while, that works. Orders go out. Customers receive them. Revenue goes up.
Then the cracks appear.
Returns from international customers become more expensive and harder to route. Cross-border costs start eating into margin before anyone is measuring them properly. Finance teams begin asking questions that operations teams can’t answer. And suddenly the gap between revenue growth and operational capability becomes impossible to ignore.
The important thing to understand is that this isn’t a failure of ambition or planning. It’s a structural pattern. Paid social doesn’t respect borders. Organic demand doesn’t wait for you to build a cross-border strategy before it shows up. The platforms that brands use to grow, Shopify, Meta, TikTok, don’t have a “domestic only” setting.
What this creates is a very specific kind of operational challenge. The brand looks international from the outside. The infrastructure, if you dig into it, is still built around assumptions that made sense when 90% of customers were in the same country.
The first step toward fixing it is recognising it. And for many brands, that recognition is still catching up with the reality of their revenue mix.
We spoke to 24 fast-growing ecommerce brands for this research, primarily in fashion and consumer goods, with revenues ranging from approximately £10m to £100m. The full report is worth reading if you’re running or advising a brand at this stage of growth. Not because it has all the answers, but because it makes visible a set of problems that most teams are quietly navigating without a shared language for them.
If your international revenue is growing faster than your operational capability to support it, you’re not alone. You’re the norm.