Jack Betts

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Localised · Peter Jones Investment Group

Rebuilding a cross-border operation

I inherited old, broken platforms and processes after the business moved its operations to the UK, and rebuilt them. Failed payment captures fell 95%, and the cost per customer contact by around 70%.

Role
Head of Operations
When
Oct 2022 – present
Scope
Payments, logistics, compliance, service

The situation

Localised is a merchant of record. Global brands sell into new markets through it, and it takes on the payments, shipping, duties and customer service. When I joined in October 2022 the business had just been through a restructure and moved its operations to the UK. The platforms and processes were there, but they were old and broken, and my job was to rebuild them into an operation that worked.

What I did

  • Rebuilt the foundations in six months. A roadmap, OKRs, SOPs and KPI reporting covering aged orders, click-to-deliver, exceptions, failed captures, refunds and service SLAs.
  • Rebuilt payments and fraud operations on Adyen, PayPal and Forter: quarantine review, capture logic and chargebacks. I changed the process so payments are captured from customers earlier, removing points of failure. Failed payment captures fell from about £32k a year to about £1.6k (around 95% less).
  • Wrote the Shopify payments strategy across multiple territories, including the local payment methods shoppers expect in Japan, Korea and the UAE.
  • Rebuilt the carrier network, fully DDP, across SEKO, Asendia and DHL, with hub and direct-ship models, then benchmarked tariffs and renegotiated US rates.
  • Picked the right cross-border model. Merchant, seller, importer or exporter of record (MOR, SOR, IOR, EOR), the import and export model, and the Incoterms behind it: knowing the differences is what decides who carries the duty, the tax and the risk for each brand and market.
  • Handled the compliance. Tightened HS-code and duty accuracy, and got the business ready for the EU customs reform.
  • Outsourced customer service in my first three months. I chose, contracted and onboarded a multilingual partner — 14 native-language agents — run against SLAs. The average cost per contact fell from about £15 to about £4.50, around 70% less.
  • Wrote the ops side of the client launch playbook, so every new brand goes live the same way.

What changed

  • −95%failed payment captures: about £32k a year down to £1.6k
  • 5regions served: UK, EU, US, Middle East, APAC
  • £15 → £4.50average cost per customer contact, in three months
  • 10%off US carrier rates, across all destinations

Brands including Callaway, Juicy Couture, Lily & Bean and Bo+Tee launched on a repeatable playbook. The KPIs became the team's daily management rhythm, so problems show up in the numbers instead of in a customer's inbox.

What I'd do next

Push more of the exception handling into automation. AI is good at triaging aged orders, failed captures and carrier exceptions, so the team only touches the cases that need a person. The returns portal showed me how quickly a well-specified tool can go live. I'd use the same approach on the next few manual processes.