It's 3pm on a Tuesday in Melbourne. A customer just loaded $340 worth of winter gear into their cart, selected next-day delivery, and hit buy without hesitation.

10 years ago, that same customer would've visited three stores first, tried on items for 2 hours, and probably walked out with shopping bags from your competitor next door.

What changed? Consumers now trust the delivery promise from online shopping enough to waive the benefit of trying and touching products in-person.

The convenience of fast delivery and easy returns have spoiled us as a nation, with shipping options from Amazon and Temu creating heightened expectations that didn't exist 10 years ago.

But, in 2025, everything is harder, more expensive, and converts worse than the glory days of ecommerce during COVID lockdowns. Today’s retailers are really starting to feel the pinch.

We sat down with the one person we know has his finger firmly on the pulse of today’s commerce landscape, our Joint CEO and Co-founder, Rob Hango-Zada, to get his take on where Australian retail is heading in 2026 and beyond. Having been in the trenches of Australian ecommerce for over a decade, watching delivery evolve from an afterthought to a make-or-break moment, Rob's got unique insights that often challenges the norm.

Read on for the full download, and learn why Rob’s excited about how AI is going to re-level the playing field.

Everything is now table stakes

"If CAC is the new rent, then delivery is the new checkout counter. That is the most important part of making a sale today," states Rob.

There’s a comfort in doing what you know, optimising CAC, A/B testing channels - making incremental movements.

But, Rob describes the trap that staying in this comfort zone lays for retailers today: "I think retailers have a lot on their mind. An expression that I've used quite often is the one of the frog in the boiling pot. Whilst a lot of retailers are trying to squash particular cost pressures on a day-to-day basis, it's almost like whack-a-mole. There's a new cost over here and a new cost over there."

Here’s a reality check:

• Meta Ads and PPC no longer provide consistent, positive ROAS
• Tech stacks are more bloated than your WISMO inbox
• Influencers are demanding bigger payments for diminishing returns
• Customer acquisition is becoming completely unsustainable

The irony is stark: retailers will spend months negotiating a 5% reduction in shipping costs, but then lose 20% of potential repeat customers because their delivery experience fell short.

Meanwhile, something interesting is happening. Great delivery experiences are creating organic acquisition loops that compound over time for certain retailers (hello, 37-minute deliveries from Petbarn) - driving word-of-mouth, repeat purchases, and referrals.

Time and time again, the companies that win are the companies who invest in the delivery experience – the next frontier for growing market share and keeping it.

There’s a clear choice on the horizons in retail’s battle for survival: Continue the whack-a-mole cost game, or invest in the delivery experience to drive long-term growth.

3 reasons why delivery is your safest moat

With 82.8% of retailers now concerned about Amazon and Temu's dominance (up from 54% last year), most are trying to compete on the global giants' terms: price and scale. But three major shifts are making the delivery experience the only sustainable differentiator.

AI-powered discovery is going mainstream

ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than any consumer application in history - just two months after launch, according to UBS research.

Consumer behaviour is now shifting toward AI-powered discovery. OpenAI's partnerships with major ecommerce platforms like Shopify are accelerating AI-driven product discovery, with integration allowing users to browse and purchase products directly within ChatGPT. Meanwhile, social media has become a primary research channel, with 32% of consumers now using social media for product research compared to 27% in 2023, according to McKinsey's 2025 State of Consumer report.

"When customers start product searches in AI assistants, your delivery reputation is what gets recommended," Rob noted.

AI sources information from the open web, including Reddit reviews. LLMs analyse customer sentiment, reviews, and social media mentions of brands to form personalised recommendations. Instead of only focusing on optimising product descriptions on-site, it’s now paramount to keep your eye on off-site sentiment and the post-purchase shipping experience. Disgruntled customers complaining on public spaces will now leave a permanent mark on your brand's AI discoverability.

Social commerce demands instant gratification

TikTok Shop is expanding aggressively in Australia, following explosive growth in Southeast Asian markets where live commerce drives billions in sales.

The instant gratification expectations of social commerce are reshaping delivery standards across all channels.

"Brands that can promise and deliver in 2-3 hour windows will own these instant gratification channels," Rob explains.

This is where local presence beats global scale through same-day delivery via ship-from-store, click-and-collect options, and tech that allocates the best service levels for regional deliveries. When social commerce demands instant gratification, brands that can seal the deal with accurate delivery dates win.

> Are you investigating ship-from-store? Check out our previous edition of Delivered to learn more

First-party data is your survival currency

Third-party cookie deprecation accelerates through 2025, while iOS privacy changes continue fragmenting traditional attribution models. The brands that own customer data own the future, with delivery being the key to unlocking that intel.

"Delivery touchpoints become your primary customer data collection system. Miss these moments, lose the relationship," Rob warns.

Here's where the real advantage lies: delivery data reveals customer behaviour patterns that directly impact profitability.

→ Which customers consistently choose premium delivery and generate higher margins?

→ Which delivery windows correlate with repeat purchases?

→ Which postcodes have customers who rarely return items?

Customer segmentation then becomes your superpower that informs everything from inventory placement to loyalty program design.

When only one in three retailers regularly use delivery data to optimise operations, there's an opportunity for retailers willing to invest in shipping intelligence.

So, what’s the next move?

Australian retailers are caught between international giants with deeper pockets and local customers with rising expectations. The knee-jerk response is cost-cutting: cheaper carriers, reduced service levels, delayed tech investments.

But that's playing Amazon's game on Amazon's terms, and making bets that are too small to win.

As Nate Elias, Senior Shipping Solutions Manager at Shippit, says: "Retailers don't need to compete with Amazon from a scale or infrastructure perspective. You can use your stores more strategically. If you've got inventory close to customers, you've already got an edge."

Aside from proximity to local customers being a key advantage for Aussie retailers to deliver fast, there’s also an opportunity to level the playing field by wielding new technologies like AI, agentic workflows, and their own data.

"I think there's a lot of data out in the market across this industry, but we're seldom harnessing it in the right way. What if the pick-and-pack algorithm in the warehouse and the driver’s routing system are no longer siloed? What if they lived together? That’s the question we want to answer and what we are focusing on answering with our product roadmap at Shippit,” Rob shares.

That idea was the vision for how Shippit Intelligence was formed. By joining up data, analytics, and the insights you already have on hand, Shippit Intelligence takes on an AI and agentic framework - the Shippit loop - which covers the four jobs-to-be-done for commerce and logistics stakeholders: plan, promise, orchestrate and deliver.

“Then, when it comes to orchestration, the lines have blurred across traditional delivery service models like Standard, Express and On Demand. To power today’s ecommerce powerhouses, it’s all about smarter allocation of carriers and dispatching drivers in captive fleets; making it possible to do this today thanks to machine learning. As an example, the Smart Assign capability in NowGo by Shippit allows deliveries to drop into existing runs, without impacting cost or the customer experience. Dynamic, agile and reliable.

“And finally, for the ‘deliver’ part of the loop: it’s about anticipating change and guiding consumers when deliveries go off-track. This is where agentic AI was born to be used, and we’re about to release agentic support to eradicate the WISMO load from customer support teams entirely, keeping customers informed and resolving their queries, instantly.”

Without needing to unpack the frog in the boiling pot analogy, the transformation journey in commerce delivery needs to start today. As an industry, if we continue with small, incremental tweaks and optimisations growth will be harder to come by in the years to come. Now is the time to invest strategically in better delivery experiences that technology unlocks. Unleashing the power of shipping intelligence across your stack won’t just create a competitive advantage, it will help you step-change the way your business grows.

Take this to your next strategy meeting

The Australian retailers thriving in 2030 won't be the ones who tried to out-Amazon Amazon through cost-cutting. They'll be the ones who made delivery so consistently excellent that customers choose local, proven brands that delivered exceptional experiences all the way to the door.

Instead of short-term cost whack-a-mole, brands like The Iconic and Petbarn who continue to invest in delivery experiences are creating outsized results:

• Higher customer lifetime value through increased, retained trust
• Organic acquisition through word-of-mouth and referrals that reduces ad dependency
• Protection against international competitors who can’t challenge their loyal customer base and local presence

While most retailers remain trapped in reactive cost-cutting cycles, others are climbing out of the boiling pot entirely.

They're choosing strategic investments and bigger swings over quarterly savings, building the loyalty systems that will define retail success in 2026 and beyond.