E-commerce returns are unavoidable. Regardless of if you sell on Amazon, Shopify, marketplaces, or your own website, some percentage of orders will come back. Online shopping has removed the ability for customers to touch, test, or try-on products before buying, and nothing can completely fix that.

What can be fixed is how often customers feel disappointed once their order arrives. Most e-commerce returns don’t happen because customers are malicious or trying to game the system. Most of the time, returns happen because the product that arrived didn’t match what the customer expected, simple as that. That gap between expectation and reality is why most returns happen.

Reducing e-commerce returns doesn’t need to involve fighting customers or tightening return policies. It’s about managing expectations before checkout. Below are eight simple, but boring ways to reduce return rates by closing that gap.

I’ve been quietly gatekeeping this, but if you’re in France in January or July, it’s impossible to miss. Every shop window, from luxury boutiques to high-street chains, is plastered with the same word in bold letters: SOLDES.

To anyone visiting from outside France, it looks like a normal sale season. It’s not.

Les Soldes are a legally regulated national retail event, with fixed dates and strict rules. This is not just a marketing moment. It’s a very specific system.

So… what is Les Soldes?

In France, retailers are only allowed to run official Soldes twice a year:

• Winter Soldes (January–February)

• Summer Soldes (June–July)

These dates are set nationally. Retailers do not choose them, extend them, or move them around. When the window opens, it opens for everyone. When it closes, it closes for everyone.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Lila Landis

As a digital nomad, I’m also very aware of what I buy. I don’t have closets or storage space spread across multiple rooms. Everything I buy has to earn its place. That usually means I’m drawn to pieces that are well-made, versatile, and a little bit interesting, things that let me keep a personal style without defaulting to the same black jeans and plain t-shirts everywhere I go.

So on a rainy afternoon in London, the last time I visited, I walked into a charity shop and found a well-fitted tweed blazer. It fit properly, felt high quality, and worked with the rest of my very limited wardrobe. The find itself was luck, but the conditions that make moments like that possible are very predictable in a retail culture where second-hand shopping is normalized and accessible.

Charity shops and second-hand retail stores aren’t just a trend or a sustainability talking point. They represent a functioning circular supply chain operating at scale, in plain sight.

When companies talk about “cutting logistics costs,” the conversation almost always goes straight to rates. But for most businesses, the real money leaks are not from rates, they’re buried in timing, processes, and people's decisions that quietly add cost every single day.
Here are 11 fixable problems that cost you money long before a carrier ever sends an invoice.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Julie David

Every December, most companies are deep in the trenches of peak season: scrambling through backorders, juggling last-minute changes, and praying their carriers don’t call in with weather delays. But somehow, one operation manages to deliver on time, with perfect accuracy, at a global scale. Every year.

Santa’s.

It might be whimsical, but if you strip away the magic and look at the structure, Santa runs the most efficient seasonal operation on the planet, and his planning principles are worth paying attention to.

People ask me all the time how I manage to network while living out of a suitcase, and honestly, I get why they’re curious. It sounds chaotic from the outside, new cities every month or so, different coworking spaces, shifting time zones, different languages, but for me, networking hasn’t become harder. If anything, this lifestyle has made it even more natural.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a people person. I’ve always been able to walk into a room and walk out with five new conversations to follow up on later. That didn’t change just because I packed my life into a suitcase and hit the road. What changed is the radius of who I meet. My “local” meeting radius now spans countries.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Nikki McKnight

This entire blog started because of my inbox. Specifically: PR emails.

If you work in or around logistics media, you know exactly the ones I mean. The subject line “AI Powered”. The whole email is full of AI this and AI that. And yet somehow, after reading the email three or four times, I still can’t tell what the product actually does.

Is it AI?
Is it automation?
Is it a well-organized workflow with a buzzword glued on top?

Because honestly, how can every new tech and platform be AI?

The more pitches I saw, the more obvious the real issue became: as an industry, we’ve blurred the line between what’s simply a fast, reliable automated process and what is actually intelligent technology capable of learning, adapting, or predicting. And that distinction matters, not just for accuracy, but for budgets, expectations, and whether a team ends up with the right tool for the right job. So let’s talk about it properly, without the jargon-y nonsense.

There’s a specific kind of person who ends up in logistics: the “don’t worry, I’ll handle it” type.
Every industry has them, but logistics seems to attract them in bulk. Maybe it’s the constant problem-solving, maybe it’s the adrenaline of fixing things minutes before they break, or maybe it’s just the culture we all grew up in, where being busy meant you were important. And it shows,  logistics workers actually rank #1 for burnout risk of any industry, with 20% over-utilized, 15% at risk, and the longest average workday at 9 hours and 10 minutes.

But somewhere along the way, “handling it” quietly turns into “carrying the entire company on your back.” And most people don’t realize the cost of that until they’re already paying it.

The funny thing is, doing everything yourself feels efficient. It feels responsible. It feels faster at the moment — just answer the email, just update the file, just follow up on the truck, just redo the spreadsheet because the formatting is a disaster and you’re the only one who knows how it should look.

But the truth is this: every time you jump in to do it yourself, you reinforce a system where you are the system. And that’s where the real trouble starts.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Casey Jenkins

Every time a new story breaks about trucking fraud, unsafe carriers, or tragic accidents, the same narrative rolls out:
“It’s the foreign carriers.”
“It’s the non-domiciled drivers.”
“It’s these fly-by-night operations ruining the industry.”

It’s predictable, emotional, and completely unhelpful.

Because here’s the truth: the biggest threat to North American trucking isn’t who is behind the wheel. It’s how the system allows people to slip through cracks that we all know are there.

When we keep blaming people instead of processes, we’re not solving problems, we’re fuelling hate and perpetuating the root issues.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Martha Brown

Everyone’s got opinions about food; local is better, fresh is best, labels tell the truth.
But most of what we believe about how food gets to us isn’t actually true.

And these myths don’t just affect what we buy, they shape how the entire supply chain operates, from how products are labeled to how much food gets wasted before it ever reaches a plate.

Here are five food myths that have real consequences for the people moving your groceries from farm to fork.

It's been about a month since London International Shipping Week ended, and I still catch myself thinking about it, not the panels or receptions, but what the week revealed about how fragmented the supply chain industry really is.

After twenty years in trucking and brokerage, I thought I understood logistics. I've spent enough time in warehouses, dispatch offices, and meeting rooms to know what makes the system tick and what makes it break. But stepping into the maritime world reminded me that we aren't one industry. We're a collection of silos, each fighting similar battles without realizing how much overlap there really is.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Serena Kanline

If you’ve opened TikTok lately, you’ve probably seen it, the Le Creuset Mystery Box unboxings. People are filming themselves tearing into sealed boxes of colourful cookware like it’s Christmas morning. Screams, squeals, gasps over the colour they wanted or a pot they had been eyeing and somewhere, a logistics manager is quietly smiling.

Because this isn’t just a marketing stunt, it’s a supply-chain strategy wrapped in enamel and hype.

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn in this industry, you’ve seen it: glossy corporate posts about “supporting women in trucking,” event recaps showing off all-female panels, and photo ops with hashtags about inclusion. And don’t get me wrong, it looks good. It makes us feel like progress is happening. But let’s be real: polished posts and performative panels don’t protect women from harassment, help close pay gaps, or create safer, fairer work environments for women in trucking and logistics.

Because when the spotlight shifts, the cracks show. We saw it in the way the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) handled harassment at their own event. We saw it when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) quietly shut down its Sexual Harassment & Assault Study, the one initiative that could’ve given us actual data to build solutions with. Both are painful yet unsurpprising reminders that while the industry loves to say it supports women, actions often tell a different story.

Welcome to our series celebrating the incredible women in Supply Chain and Logistics! In a traditionally male-dominated field, it's important to shine a light on the inspiring women who are making a significant impact. Through a mix of insightful and fun questions, we’ll explore their journeys, challenges, and successes. While we acknowledge the contributions of everyone in this industry, this series aims to elevate the voices and stories of women who often get missed. Next up: Katie Rodas