Evolving Expectations 2026

This report is for retailers who want to understand where that gap is forming and, more importantly, what to do about it. Evolving Expectations 2026 draws on survey data from retailers globally, alongside expert perspectives from across the retail ecosystem. It examines how leading teams are responding, from connecting fragmented systems and automating fulfilment decisions to rethinking delivery strategy and post-purchase experience.

What you’ll take away is a clear picture of where the divide is forming between retailers who are adapting and those who aren’t, and a practical view of what needs to change operationally to close the gap.

This gap highlights a common pattern: retailers are automating individual tasks, but not the workflows that connect them. The result is partial efficiency gains, but not true scalability. Orders still require manual intervention across inventory, picking, routing, and exception handling, creating bottlenecks as volume increases.

This is where the gap between capability and execution starts to show. Most retailers now have access to automation tools, but without connected systems and clear workflows, those tools operate in isolation.

Leading retailers are approaching automation differently. Instead of layering tools onto existing processes, they are redesigning fulfilment workflows to be system-led, where routine decisions are handled automatically, and teams focus on exceptions rather than day-to-day processing.

Automation is becoming a reflection of how well operations are structured to scale.

Delivery expectations are no longer increasing gradually, they’re compounding. Customers now expect fast, low-cost, and flexible delivery as standard, driven by marketplace benchmarks and competitive pressure.

Recent data from Australia Post reinforces this shift: 69% of shoppers now expect delivery options at checkout, while many are willing to switch retailers entirely to access faster or more flexible delivery. Speed is a growing differentiator, with up to 66% of consumers willing to switch for faster delivery, and 43% willing to pay for it in certain situations.

One of the most important, and most overlooked, findings from retailers operating at the leading edge is that customers aren’t forming delivery expectations at checkout. They’re forming them earlier, during browsing and product research, based on what competitors and marketplaces have already conditioned them to expect.

By the time a customer reaches checkout, they’ve already decided what delivery should look like. Presenting something different at that final step isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a direct cause of abandonment. The implication for retailers is significant: fixing the checkout experience alone won’t close the gap if the underlying delivery offering doesn’t match what customers have already come to expect.

Fuel surcharges, carrier rate increases, and growing delivery expectations have all contributed to higher fulfilment costs. But the impact isn’t being felt equally. Retailers with manual workflows, disconnected systems, and limited flexibility are absorbing those increases far more than those with optimised operations.

This is where the gap starts to widen. Many retailers are still managing fulfilment reactively, defaulting to a single carrier, manually selecting services, or relying on fixed delivery setups that don’t adapt as conditions change. Industry data shows that free delivery remains one of the most influential factors in purchase decisions, further compressing margins.

The result is hidden cost leakage. Orders are shipped using suboptimal services, split unnecessarily, or expedited to recover missed expectations, all of which erode margin over time.

Leading retailers are approaching cost differently. Instead of treating it as something to absorb or pass on, they are actively optimising for it by using multi-carrier strategies, automation, and better visibility to reduce inefficiencies at every step of the fulfilment process.

Cost pressure is becoming a measure of how well operations are built to adapt.

Increasingly, the trigger for adding a new carrier isn’t operational failure or contract expiry, it’s data. Several enterprise retailers have identified specific drop-off patterns in their sales and delivery data that pointed directly to a carrier gap.

In one example, retailers noticed a significant decline in Thursday order volumes when the projected delivery date fell on a Monday. The fix wasn’t a discount or a campaign, it was adding an on-demand carrier to enable Saturday delivery, which recovered the conversion drop almost immediately. That kind of decision represents carrier strategy driven by checkout behaviour data rather than logistics logic.

But adoption alone isn’t solving the problem. Many retailers are still adding carriers without changing how decisions are made, introducing more complexity without gaining real flexibility. Carrier choice remains manual or static for too many operations, based on habit, default settings, or limited rules, rather than dynamically optimised based on cost, delivery promise, or performance.

Without the ability to switch between carriers intelligently and in real time, retailers are left absorbing rising costs, missing delivery expectations, or both. The retailers closing that gap have embedded carrier selection into fulfilment logic, driven by rules and automation that balance cost, speed, and reliability at the order level.

Multi-carrier is now less about having options, and more about using them effectively, and increasingly, about knowing when to add a new one.

The retailers managing cross-border profitably have reframed the problem. International fulfilment isn’t expensive because shipping is expensive. It’s expensive because most operations weren’t built with the variables of cross-border in mind, such as duties, taxes, customs documentation, delivery variability by market, and the customer experience implications of getting any of those wrong.

The most immediate lever is where duties and taxes are handled.Retailers who absorb those costs at the back end are building a structural margin problem into every international order. Calculating and collecting duties and taxes at checkout instead, and presenting customers with a full landed cost upfront, removes refused deliveries, reduces customer service load, and protects margin without changing carrier economics.

Beyond duties, retailers have more strategic options than most are currently using. Consolidation models, where orders are batched and inserted into local carrier networks at destination, can significantly reduce per-unit cost on high-volume lanes. For retailers with consistent demand in specific regions, these models can significantly change the cost of cross-border shipping, but they need upfront operational design rather than reactive cost management.

Leading retailers are building international fulfilment as a distinct operational model and setting up delivery options, duty handling, and carrier strategies by region rather than applying domestic logic to markets with fundamentally different requirements.

The disconnect is clear: retailers understand the importance of post-purchase, but many haven’t put actions in place to operationalise it.

Too often, fulfilment is treated as the final step in the transaction, focused on getting orders out the door, rather than what happens after. Tracking pages, notifications, returns, and customer service are managed reactively, with limited consistency or visibility.

This is where the opportunity is being missed. The post-purchase experience is one of the few moments where retailers have repeated, high-attention touchpoints with customers after conversion.

Leading retailers are treating this differently. They’re using automation, branding, and proactive communication to turn fulfilment into an extension of the customer experience, thereby reducing support queries, increasing trust, and driving repeat purchase.

The shift is simple: fulfilment doesn’t end at delivery. It continues through every interaction that follows.

The more significant shift is happening away from the checkout entirely. Recommerce, the resale and refurbishment of goods, is emerging as the most concrete intersection of sustainability and commercial opportunity. In Australia, 73% of online shoppers express interest in purchasing second-hand or refurbished goods directly from retailers, and 37% are already doing so. Yet only 14% of retailers currently sell or partner to sell second-hand goods, and just 13% offer trade-in or buy-back programs.

That’s a significant gap between where customer behaviour is heading and where retail operations currently sit. Closing it requires building reverse logistics capability like returns processing, refurbishment handling, and inventory management for pre-owned stock, into fulfilment models that weren’t designed with that flow in mind.

The retailers making progress on sustainability aren’t waiting for customers to opt in. They’re embedding it into how fulfilment operates: optimising packaging, reducing delivery distances through distributed fulfilment models like ship-from-store, and building the reverse logistics infrastructure that recommerce requires.

AI adoption is widespread, but it’s not yet where it matters most. Usage is still concentrated in customer service (44.9%) and marketing personalisation (34.8%), while adoption in fulfilment-specific areas like delivery prediction (13%) and warehouse optimisation (13%) remains low.

This points to a clear pattern. Retailers are applying AI at the edges of the business, where it’s easier to implement and quicker to show results, but not yet embedding it into core operational workflows.

The barrier isn’t access to technology, it’s readiness. Lack of expertise (24.6%) and integration challenges (20.3%) are the biggest obstacles, reinforcing that AI depends on connected systems and reliable data to be effective. As a result, many retailers are seeing incremental gains rather than meaningful operational impact.

Leading retailers are embedding AI into decision-making across fulfilment, using it to improve accuracy, reduce manual intervention, and optimise performance at scale.

As this shift continues, AI will play an increasingly central role in enabling more adaptive, responsive fulfilment operations particularly as complexity and scale increase.