The Story of eComID: Building a New Era of Responsible Online Shopping

The Story of eComID: Building a New Era of Responsible Online Shopping

The numbers told a story Oscar Rundqvist couldn’t ignore. Between 2019 and 2022, product returns in the US nearly doubled. By 2022, returns hit $800 billion. But it wasn’t just the scale of the problem that bothered him. It was watching it happen in real-time, knowing the market was solving it all wrong.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Oscar Rundqvist, CEO and Co-Founder of eComID, shared the story of how a year at H&M leading digital customer experience became the catalyst for building an entirely new category.

The Broken System Revealed

Oscar’s founding story doesn’t begin with an epiphany or a hackathon. It begins with frustration born from proximity to a massive, complex problem. “Before founding eComID, almost exactly a year ago, actually, I was working at HNO, leading the digital customer experience there,” Oscar explains. “I realized hands on how extremely broken the product returns space is.”

The word “hands on” matters here. Oscar wasn’t reading about the returns crisis in industry reports. He was living inside it, watching the mechanics of dysfunction play out across one of the world’s largest fashion retailers. “I realized also that the market is really missing some solutions to it,” he says. “So that was what made me motivated to find something and to basically help brands to tackle this problem, which is a really complex one.”

The Pandemic Changed Everything

What made the problem so complex wasn’t just its size. It was how consumer behavior had fundamentally shifted. “During the pandemic, amount of return was almost like, free doubled in the US,” Oscar notes. “I think one reason was that the customer behavior back then changed because the physical selling, like, got completely out of the way.”

Without physical stores, brands overcompensated with generous return policies. Customers adapted with what Oscar calls “bracketing” behavior, buying the same product in multiple sizes with full intention to return most of them. “That had now got stuck,” Oscar says. “Customers are shopping in a way they’re bracketing, meaning that they buy the same products in multiple sizes, et cetera, which has led to return rates often up around 50%.”

The behavioral shift stuck even as stores reopened. And the brands? “54% of all dresses that was bought online in Europe last year were returned,” Oscar reveals.

The Market Was Solving the Wrong Problem

When Oscar surveyed the competitive landscape, he found plenty of companies building solutions. They just weren’t solving the actual problem. “There are a lot of really good startups and innovators within returns management. So post purchase, helping brands to deal with the returns when they occur,” he explains. “But what we saw is that there are fewer brands and startups that help brands reduce the returns proactively.”

This distinction became eComID’s founding insight. Returns management optimizes the logistics of handling returns after they happen. Returns reduction prevents them from happening in the first place. One addresses symptoms. The other addresses causes.

“We want to really tackle the problem before it occurs,” Oscar says. This wasn’t just differentiation for the sake of positioning. It was a fundamentally different approach to a problem everyone else was accepting as inevitable.

Building Pre-Purchase Solutions

eComID’s solution operates at three levels. First is education through what Oscar calls “green nudging.” “We in the brands experiences, we nudge the customers and inform them, educate them about the environmental impact of returns,” he explains. “We’ve seen studies that just doing this can lead to like a more than 2% decrease in returns and not affecting revenue.”

Second is dynamic incentives. “Return policies can change depending on how much return,” Oscar says. “So that if you’re like, not returning a lot and shopping in a responsible way, you will get better return policies.”

Third is intelligent guidance, using purchase and return history to recommend the right sizes before customers add items to cart.

The Intentional Slow Build

A year in, eComID is taking an approach that might seem counterintuitive. “We have a waitlist on our side with brands signing up on a weekly basis right now,” Oscar notes. But they’re not rushing to onboard everyone.

“We intentionally right now are not onboarding all brands at the same time,” Oscar explains. “We rather want to have fewer but better and I guess in a way deeper relationships with a few brands we select to onboard.”

This patience reflects hard-won lessons about category creation. You can’t scale a category that doesn’t exist yet. Having raised over $3 million with multiple term sheets, Oscar learned to flip the script. “When you are a Founder, you can also do your due diligence on your investors,” he emphasizes.

Making Responsible Shopping Cool

Oscar’s vision for marketing goes beyond typical B2B tactics. “We want to make it cool to shop in a responsible way and we want to make it rewarding,” he says. The company is exploring gamification where low return rates unlock exclusive access and rewards.

“Imagine if the kids could compare the return rates and the ones with low return rates would encourage in a way,” Oscar suggests. It’s a vision of returns becoming social currency, where restraint becomes status rather than consumption.

The Future: A New Era of Returns

When Oscar looks ahead three to five years, he sees something bigger than a software company. “We acknowledge that product returns is not one brand’s problem, it’s an industry wide problem,” he explains. “We also want to provide an industry wide solution and really tackle this problem into a new kind of era of returns, where online shopping is not what it is today.”

In this future, “customers are shopping in a responsible way, informative way, informed way, and that it’s fun to keep and you should always shop to keep.” Bracketing disappears. Return rates normalize. The $800 billion problem becomes a relic of an earlier era of e-commerce.

Oscar’s story with eComID is still being written, but the first chapter is clear: sometimes the most important companies are built by people who live inside broken systems long enough to understand not just what’s broken, but why everyone else is trying to fix it wrong.