Major e-commerce marketplace platforms in the US have high average return rates of nearly 21% and charge steep commissions of 8-15%. Merchants often have to absorb the full cost of returns, face delayed payments, and deal with many unreasonable platform policies. This is why headless e-commerce and headless CMS solutions are popular in the US, using existing APIs and backends to quickly build e-commerce platforms. This, in turn, has created a lot of demand for front-end development jobs. With platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, order processing is usually not a problem, but when it comes to return processes, integrating other payment gateways, inventory management, ERP, fine-grained shopping cart control, adding custom fields, and customizing your own workflows, you run into limitations. Labor costs are high, so eventually, you have no choice but to build it yourself or graft on your own backend. After an order is placed, that's when the real challenges of e-commerce begin. As the business starts to scale, integrating these heterogeneous systems gradually becomes a problem.