The Questions Mid-Market Ecommerce Keeps Asking
(And Still Can’t Answer)
Good research doesn’t always end with conclusions. Sometimes it ends with better questions.
That’s an honest description of where our returns and cross-border research landed. We spoke to operators at 24 fast-growing ecommerce brands. We heard consistent patterns, clear frustrations, and genuine insight about what’s working and what isn’t. We also heard the same questions surfacing repeatedly, across different businesses, different team functions, and different levels of operational maturity. Questions that don’t have clean answers yet.
What does good look like for exchange conversion?
Nobody we spoke to felt confident they knew. Most brands are capturing some value through exchanges and store credit. Very few can benchmark their performance against anything meaningful. They know the mechanic works. They don’t know if they’re running it well.
Cross-border margin by market
This one came up constantly and almost always in the same form: finance wants to know, operations can’t tell them, and the data to bridge the gap lives across systems that don’t reconcile cleanly. Brands with 40%, 50%, 60% international revenue are making market-level decisions without market-level visibility.
When to bring it in-house
There’s no universal answer here, and the research doesn’t pretend there is. The right call depends on volume, team capability, market complexity, and a dozen other variables that look different for every business. But the question is being asked more frequently and more seriously than it was two years ago, particularly as platform costs attract more scrutiny.
The diffuse pain problem
How do you build a business case for re-platforming when the pain is diffuse? This might be the hardest one. The operational drag from a returns or cross-border setup that’s no longer fit for purpose is real, but it doesn’t always show up in a single line on a P&L. It shows up in manual workarounds, in margin that leaks before anyone measures it, in finance questions that ops teams can’t answer, in customer service overrides that create inconsistency nobody is tracking. Quantifying diffuse pain well enough to justify a migration is genuinely difficult, and most teams don’t have a good framework for doing it.
Why the unhappy paths matter
Our consultant Dom Macgowan captured the underlying complexity well: “From a data perspective, returns are inherently messy. You’re relying on the customer doing exactly what they said they would to stay on the happy path. With returns, like many processes, it’s the unhappy paths that take up 80% of the complexity. Customers register what they want to return, but what actually arrives at the DC can be completely different. Processes can quickly fall over and create lots of manual work if these unhappy paths aren’t thought through from a systematic point of view.”
That’s true of returns. It’s equally true of cross-border operations, and of the broader challenge of building operational infrastructure that can handle international complexity at scale.
What this research is, and isn’t
We’re not going to pretend the research closes these questions. What it does is make them visible, give them a shared vocabulary, and surface enough pattern across enough businesses to make them feel less like individual operational failures and more like structural challenges that the industry is working through together.
This report is the first in an ongoing series. Over the coming months we’ll be expanding the research, going deeper on benchmarking, cross-border cost transparency, and integration architecture. The goal isn’t a definitive guide. It’s an ongoing body of work that reflects how mid-market brands are actually operating and surfaces the insights that help operators make better decisions.
If any of this reflects your reality, or raises more questions than it answers, the full report is the right place to start.