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.

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.

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.