Return rates cut, carrier costs lowered, ops teams that run on 15 minutes a day instead of 3 hours. Here's the data.
StrideWear had a 31% return rate on Amazon UK orders. FulfilOp's carrier analysis identified a single carrier performing 3× worse than alternatives on specific postal districts. The fix took one routing rule and 20 minutes.
LuminaBeauty's COD orders were returning at nearly 4× their prepaid rate. A single rule — high-value COD orders via their most reliable carrier — cut the COD return rate by more than half within 30 days.
TechCraft was routing all US orders from a single East Coast warehouse. Customers in California and Texas were experiencing 4+ day transit. FulfilOps implemented nearest-warehouse logic across three fulfilment centres.
FormPeak had a chronic problem with high-value fitness equipment orders being refused at delivery. FulfilOp's exception queue surfaced high-risk COD orders for a quick confirmation call before dispatch.
GrazeBox's ops team was spending 3+ hours daily manually assigning couriers and generating manifests across Shopify, Amazon, and their own site. FulfilOps collapsed the daily workflow to a single approval step.
NovaDerm was blending their channel return data. FulfilOp's analytics separated returns by channel — revealing TikTok Shop orders returning at 3× the rate of their Shopify store. Channel-specific carrier rules fixed it.
StrideWear sells premium activewear across the US and UK, processing 3,400 orders per day. When Amazon UK returns hit 31%, their ops director assumed it was a product-fit problem. It turned out to be a carrier problem.
StrideWear had been using a regional carrier for UK fulfilment because they offered the lowest rate card. What they didn't know was that this carrier had a 28% return rate on postal districts in Northern England and Scotland — nearly triple the rate of alternatives in the same areas.
Because StrideWear was looking at blended return data by product category, this signal was invisible. The carrier routing pattern was consistent, so returns from those postal districts just looked like a regional demand problem, not a logistics problem.
We genuinely thought customers in those areas just didn't like the fit. We were considering pulling certain SKUs. The FulfilOps analytics showed us it was pure carrier performance — the same products, the same customers, were delivering fine when routed through UPS.
— James Thornton, Head of Operations, StrideWear Co.FulfilOps's carrier performance analytics broke down return rates by carrier × postal district. The analysis identified 8 postal districts where the regional carrier's return rate exceeded 25%. A single routing rule was created: orders to those postal districts → UPS only.
The original carrier's rate card was $1.20/shipment lower than UPS in those postal districts. But at 28% returns, the true cost per delivered order was $9.40 (rate + return cost amortized). UPS at 8.4% returns brought that true cost to $7.85 per delivered order — cheaper, despite the higher sticker rate.
This is the core insight that FulfilOps surfaces: carrier selection should be based on true cost per delivered order, not rate card.
Connect your fulfilment data and FulfilOps will identify your highest-impact return reduction opportunities in under 24 hours.