Halia’s field notes & benchmarks. Halia v1.0 Resources

Field notes from operators. And the math behind every finding.

Guides, benchmarks, and breakdowns for SMB e-commerce operators who’d rather find $5,000/mo than sit through a Celonis quote.

All articles

The e-commerce ops blog.

Practical, vendor-honest writing on the stuff that actually moves margin. No “10 tips to grow your store” content.

Cost

How I found $3,200/mo in hidden fulfillment costs

A 2,000-order/mo Shopify store thought it was running efficiently, until cross-platform aggregation surfaced what nobody was adding up.

Returns

The 24.5% return rate problem

NRF says US e-commerce returns hit $850B in 2025. Every return costs 20–65% of item value. Here’s how to quantify it before optimizing it.

Carriers

USPS vs. FedEx vs. UPS. The SMB carrier scorecard

Performance varies wildly across lanes and carriers. Build a scorecard that pays for itself in the first month of switching.

SLA

Don’t get suspended on Amazon: the 4% rule

Miss your 1-business-day ship-confirm SLA at rates above 4% and Amazon may suppress your listings. Drift detection catches it early.

Process mining

Process mining for stores doing under $50M

Celonis is overkill. Spreadsheets are blind. Here’s how to get the same insight on the same data, at SaaS prices.

3PL

Auditing your 3PL invoice line-by-line

A $2.75/order quote turned into $147,800 invoiced. Receiving fees, storage, packaging materials, account management. The playbook to catch them all.

Drift

The problem you fixed two months ago is back

Why drift detection matters more than dashboards. Continuous baselines, regression flagging, and the false-positive math.

Stuck orders

Finding every stuck order, not just the first 50

Most tools cap stuck-order detection at 50 results. A 463-order leak hides easily. Here’s why the cap exists. And why we removed it.

Activity mining

Manual vs. automated: the steps you think are automated but aren’t

Multi-factor classification, actor type, temporal patterns, batch detection, exposes the human work hiding inside your “automated” pipeline.

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