Logistics · 3PL · Fulfilment · Reference build

A 25.20% return rate hidden inside a 45.54% margin business.

A Power BI audit on a pan-European e-commerce operation across 20 countries, 5 carriers, and 10 product lines. €204.7K in sales across 1,000 orders. The headline profit margin looked healthy. One in four parcels was coming back, and the return rate spread across countries reached 23 percentage points. The audit isolated where and produced a country-level carrier reallocation plan.

Pages Six

Build time Five working days

Stack Power BI Desktop · DAX

Deliverable .pbix file you keep

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What the audit surfaced

The headline P&L looked clean: €204.7K in sales, 45.54% gross margin, 3.97-day average delivery time, comfortably inside the two-to-eight-day European benchmark. One in four parcels was coming back. The audit found the leak was neither in pricing nor in speed. It was in the carrier mix, the country mix, and in the exact products the brand considered its winners.

Returns are not a speed problem
Country return rates ran from 15.52% in Sweden to 38.89% in Romania. A 23-point spread. Over the same countries, average delivery time varied by just 0.19 days. The dashboards that only track delivery days would have missed this entirely.
The highest-margin products carry the highest returns
Four of the six SKUs with above-average return rates were also among the most profitable in the portfolio. Bluetooth Keyboards: 52.74% margin, 25.45% return rate. Desk Lamps: 51.03% margin, 29.87% return rate. A pricing fix solves nothing. The intervention is on packaging, product description, and expectation management, not on the P&L.
GLS 31.91% vs PostNL 21.96% · same speed band
GLS carried the highest return rate in the network at 31.91% despite a 3.96-day delivery average, only 0.04 days slower than the fastest carrier. PostNL ran the same lanes at 21.96%. Handling, packaging, or last-mile execution. Not speed.
Romania alone runs at 2x the lowest-country return rate
Romania shares coverage between GLS and FedEx and posts a 38.89% return rate, double Sweden's 15.52%. UPS already covers all of Eastern Europe. A single carrier reallocation on one country is the biggest-impact change available in the network.
Top three SKUs = 42% of sales and 42% of gross profit
Wireless Mouse, Laptop Stand, USB-C Cable. Portfolio concentration flagged at page one of the audit. The margin engine is three SKUs. Everything else is noise or liability.

“The most profitable products carry the highest returns. That is not a pricing problem. It is a customer expectation, packaging, or product description problem, and it gets solved on the operations side, not the marketing side.”

What is inside the .pbix

The report is structured as a top-down narrative. Page one sets the headline picture. Pages two and three isolate the product and profitability story. Pages four and five isolate the logistics and carrier story. Page six closes with five concrete recommendations, each one tied to a measure on an earlier page.

Executive Summary page: five operating KPIs, regional performance, product profitability, carrier mix — **Page 1. Executive Summary.** Five operating KPIs on one page: total sales, gross profit, profit margin, return rate, average delivery days. Alongside regional sales and gross profit, the product profitability table, carrier order mix, return status by category, and delivery days by region.

Product Profitability page with per-SKU margin and volume — **Page 2. Product Profitability.** Per-SKU margin, volume, and contribution. Isolates which product lines carry the network and which ride on the coat-tails of the profitable ones.

Logistics Performance page comparing carriers on return rate and delivery speed — **Page 4. Logistics Performance.** Carrier benchmarking with return rate separated from delivery speed. This is the page where GLS at 31.91% return rate versus PostNL at 21.96% (same speed band) becomes impossible to miss.

Regional performance page with country-level return rate spread — **Page 5. Regional Performance.** Country-level return rate spread from 15.52% in Sweden to 38.89% in Romania. Also carries the country-level carrier reallocation recommendation.

Multi-carrier benchmarking
Carrier performance separated from regional performance, then layered together so the interaction effects become visible. Every carrier looks fine on its own average. The network view shows which combinations drag.
Return-rate isolation
Return rate decomposed across SKU, carrier, region, and category, so the audit points to the specific intersection driving the headline number instead of blaming one dimension.
Named-carrier regional grid
UPS, GLS, FedEx, DHL and PostNL mapped per country so reallocation recommendations are concrete, not generic. Romania → UPS, Germany and Southern Europe flagged as the joint delivery-time and return-rate losers.
Named-supplier flags
Philips and Logitech surfaced as high-return suppliers inside the product-profitability page. Supplier-level filtering already modelled, so follow-up questions do not require a rebuild.
Cost-per-carrier expansion layer
Cost-per-carrier modelled as the next expansion layer so landed cost can be loaded without reshaping the star schema. Sub-four-day delivery stretch target already written into the recommendations page.

The full PDF

Six pages, twelve figures, and five recommendations. Read it for the framework, not the numbers.

Download the PDF See the DTC audit

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