How Returnless Turned Embedded Analytics Into a Revenue Driver with Holistics
Returnless, an e-commerce returns platform serving 1,500+ European retailers, stopped building analytics in-house and embedded Holistics into its product, shipping native-feeling dashboards in two weeks and turning analytics into a paid premium feature that customers upgraded for.
If you want to know how effective your in-app analytics module really is, you don't just talk to data and product; you talk to Customer Success. For only they can tell you how well it's working by what's gone missing from their inbox. Because when the analytics is doing its job, a whole category of messages is missing: the feature requests, the "can you pull this for me" asks, the support threads that used to stack up.
At Returnless, that is exactly what happened.
Joost Kempe leads Customer Success at Returnless, and for the better part of a year his inbox was filled with one recurring request. Merchants wanted to see and explore their own return data, and his small team couldn't build the dashboards fast enough to keep up. Today those messages are gone. What replaced them is a far easier ask: more data, please.
In between those two states was a simple decision: embed Holistics instead of building analytics themselves. Within a couple of weeks, Returnless had live, native dashboards running inside their own product and a premium feature that customers now upgrade to reach.
The requests we used to get before Holistics are simply gone. Customers don't ask about dashboards, features, or functionality anymore. Now they just ask for more data.
They feel they're more in control now over their dashboards. That's really great, that's exactly what we wanted. We're really happy that we found you guys.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
Holistics Embedding
To Build or To Buy: Focusing on What Returnless Does Best
Merchants who process returns live and die by return data: which products come back, why they come back, and how much revenue those returns take with them. Returnless already collected all of it. What merchants wanted was to explore it without exporting a spreadsheet.
A large share of our customers were asking for this.
We work in sprints of six weeks. We thought we'd need one quarter, maybe two, to build the same kind of features Holistics already provides.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
A quarter or two of a developer team's time is a serious bet for any company. For Returnless, every sprint spent on dashboards was a sprint not spent on the returns automation that merchants were actually paying for. Joost sat in the middle of that tradeoff. He had worked as a return reduction specialist before joining Returnless, so he knew exactly why merchants needed the data, and he could see why his engineers couldn't drop everything to build it.
I understood the requests from my customers — I worked as a return reduction specialist myself, so I needed this kind of data and these deep dives to do my own work. But I also understood my development colleagues, who had to choose between fixing bugs, building new features, or focusing on insights.
Our customers required us to do both at the same time. I wanted to do both, because both were really valuable requests. I didn't want to tell a customer I can't help you with the analytics because I don't have the time.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
In the meantime, Returnless found a way to serve its larger merchants. The team could set them up with webhooks to push return data into their own middleware and build dashboards in Tableau or Looker Studio. That worked for merchants with their own developers, but most of Returnless's customers wanted the insights delivered to them, not a data pipeline to maintain.
We could support our larger customers through our webhook functionality, but that only worked for merchants with their own development resources. For everyone else, there simply wasn't a good option — until Holistics gave us a way to serve them too.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
The team's first instinct was to build it themselves. They have strong engineering and a clear vision of what good analytics should look like. But over time, it became clear that the real constraint wasn't ambition, but time and focus: engineering needed to stay on the processing of returns only Returnless could build, while analytics called for a specialist. Once that was clear, the decision came fast.
First we created this ourselves. In our product we have an analytics module, and our team had to develop all the dashboards to provide insights to our customers. We noticed it took a lot of time to create all the features our customers requested. We work with a lean, focused team, and engineering time is something we have to allocate really deliberately.
So we had to choose: create features that actually help customers process returns, or focus on insights and dashboarding. It took a while to get to this point. But the customer demand kept growing, and at some point it became clear we couldn't postpone the decision any longer.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
Chris Boer, Returnless' co-founder and Head of Product, ran the evaluation. The team measured each option against a clear checklist of what an embedded analytics layer had to deliver:
- ClickHouse compatibility and query performance, since Returnless already ran its analytics on ClickHouse and wanted to query it directly.
- Ease of embedding and row-level security, so every merchant sees only their own data inside the Returnless product.
- Customization and theming through CSS, so the dashboards could match the look and feel of Returnless.
- Version control, Git integration, and CI/CD, so analytics could be managed with the same discipline as the rest of the codebase.
- User-friendliness for business users, so non-technical teams could work with the data on their own.
- A cost structure that scaled sensibly with an embedded delivery model.
Two of these mattered most.
On the technical side, Returnless was already running its analytics on ClickHouse, so any tool had to query ClickHouse directly. On the product side, the dashboards had to feel like part of Returnless, not a bolted-on window into someone else's software.
Chris investigated everything. We got a demo from Holistics and from another provider. Holistics was the clear fit for what our customers had asked us for.
It became really clear in the first demo that Holistics would fit all the requirements our customers had reported to us, mostly because we could embed the dashboards really well into our product.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
Two Weeks to Embedded, and the Requests Are Answered
The part the team worried about turned out to be the quick part. Wiring up the embed and the row-level security that keeps each merchant's data separate took roughly two weeks. After that, the work shifted to the constructive problem: building the dashboards themselves.
The implementation of the dashboards in our product took about two weeks — making sure the embedding on our side was really in place, and the security was in place. That was really easy, actually.
Most of the time went into creating the dashboards.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
Joost built the dashboards himself. He came in familiar with Tableau and Looker Studio, spent a couple of hours getting his bearings, and leaned on the Holistics team over a shared Slack channel when a concept, like how calculated metrics behave, worked differently than what he was used to. What surprised him was how much design control he had once he was in.
What surprised me most was the custom styling. A graph is a graph and a table is a table, but the way we could implement our own design (the size of the graph and the table, the positions) — we could really make it feel like a Returnless dashboard.
That was much easier to do with Holistics than what I experienced with other tools. It's really customizable; there are not so many limitations. You can almost lose yourself in everything you're able to do.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
That design freedom comes from Holistics Canvas Dashboards, which let a builder place and style each element with code so the analytics match the surrounding product. For a merchant clicking through their return data, the dashboard reads as one more screen in Returnless rather than a visitor from another app.
The clearest measure of the change was how sharply the number of customer questions dropped.
My team was really curious whether it would resolve all the requests from our customers, and I think it did. We don't have any complaints about deep-dive data exploration features or filtering features anymore.
The only request we get from customers now is: hey, I'm missing this kind of data, can you add it to the dashboards? And that's really easy to do right now.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
The dashboard Returnless never had time to build
One example shows what changed: in Returnless, a merchant can offer a shopper store credit instead of a cash refund, keeping the revenue in the business and, often, keeping the customer. Merchants had long wanted to see how that split played out. Building the view had never made it up the backlog.
Our customers really wanted to see how it's distributed between refunds and store credit, because they want to know: am I able to retain revenue instead of refunding everything that comes back to us?
That was a dashboard we didn't have at all before Holistics. We built it quickly, and our customers really appreciate it, now they can see how much of their returns actually retain revenue for them.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
It is a small dashboard with a direct line to a merchant's bottom line, and it existed within days of Returnless being able to build such things without an engineering sprint.
When Analytics Became a Revenue Line
Shipping a year of stalled feature requests would have justified the decision to buy embedded analytics on its own. But it didn't stop there; Returnless offers the Holistics-powered dashboards only on its premium plans, which turned analytics from a support burden into a reason to upgrade.
We only provide the Holistics dashboards in our premium plans, not our basic plans. A couple of customers upgraded to premium once we announced the new analytics dashboards.
We've seen customers upgrade specifically because of the new analytics. That's a great signal for us.
— Joost Kempe, Customer Success Lead at Returnless
The same capability that had been a source of churn risk a year earlier now shows up in Returnless' MRR. Analytics went from a cost the team couldn't afford to build to a feature merchants pay a premium to reach, and it got there two weeks after the embed went in, not two quarters after a build started.
About Returnless
Returnless does much more than just print labels. The platform automates the entire e-commerce returns process for merchants: branded return forms, automated refunds, store credit as an alternative to cash back, and a deep set of integrations that connect returns to the rest of a merchant's stack. Through its own API and native connections to platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, plus warehouse and ERP systems, Returnless ties the return flow back into the tools a merchant already runs, so the whole process is automated end to end instead of stopping at a shipping label. That breadth is a real differentiator in a market where many tools do little more than generate a return label.
Returnless now serves more than 1,500 retailers and brands across Europe and helps them reduce return rates and retain revenue. In January 2025, Returnless was acquired by JTL-Software and now operates as part of the JTL Group, one of Europe's leading e-commerce software groups. Returnless is ISO 27001 certified and a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 company.
Returnless dashboard