A customer orders from your brand, has a terrible delivery experience through DoorDash or Instacart, and leaves a one-star review that tags you, not the driver. It doesn’t matter that you never touched the package after it left the warehouse. It doesn’t matter that the delay was the platform’s fault. 

To that customer, you failed them.

This is the central tension of last mile delivery. Retailers have embraced third-party platforms to meet rising consumer expectations for speed and convenience, and for good reason. 

The recent changes in the tariff landscape have made duty and tax payments a growing concern for both consumers and global ecommerce brands, particularly when choosing between DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) and DDU (Delivered Duty Unpaid) shipping.

International commerce is no longer a simple matter of moving goods across borders, it is a complex intersection of pricing, checkout transparency, and regulatory compliance. As the global trade landscape shifts, with major markets like the US and EU exempting de minimis thresholds, the choice between Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) and Delivered Duty Unpaid (DDU) has become a primary driver of international conversion and brand trust.

Any business can now move, store, and deliver everything from raw materials to finished products quickly and reliably, using the same supply chain that supports Amazon.com. Retail, wholesale, and commercial businesses of all sizes now have access to the same logistics capabilities that have supported Amazon’s growth for decades.

These services were originally developed to power Amazon’s own retail operations and to support independent selling partners worldwide. Over the past three years, hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers have trusted the company’s logistics network to move, store, and deliver hundreds of millions of packages across third-party facilities, warehouses, and sales channels beyond the Amazon store. The launch of ASCS builds on this momentum, now supporting third-party logistics for businesses in industries such as healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, and retail.

This survey report reveals that while organizations understand the importance of last mile delivery, operational transformation still hasn’t followed. The last mile has changed, but many organizations are still treating last-mile delivery as a cost center, tracking metrics like cost per delivery, carrier rates, and route efficiency without considering the customer experience. 

It’s an approach that doesn’t reflect reality. For many customers, delivery is now the only part of the supply chain they actually experience—and it directly shapes whether they return.

This report synthesizes consumer behavior and other market insights across a dozen major destination markets in Europe, North America and Australia, some of Landmark Global’s key destination countries, to help e-tailers understand where expectations converge, where operational choices matter most, and how e-logistics performance increasingly determines success in cross-border expansion.

What you’ll find inside:

Increasingly, shoppers aren’t beginning their journey on a retailer’s website. Instead, they’re asking ChatGPT what to buy. They’re scrolling TikTok Shop. They’re clicking marketplace recommendations. According to Gartner, by the end of 2026, traditional search engine volume is expected to decline by 25 percent as consumers shift toward artificial intelligence chatbots and other virtual agents for discovery. That means the front door of commerce is no longer controlled by the retailer.

At first glance, the world seems to be pulling apart. But the data tells a different story. The world is not disconnecting – its connections are evolving. Explore the latest findings in the 2026 DHL Global Connectedness Report. The world finds itself in a period of profound geopolitical and economic uncertainty. For leaders in both the public and private sectors, volatility has become a part of daily decision-making. In such an environment, assumptions can be misleading – and facts matter more than ever.

If your fashion brand is scaling fast, fulfilment is often the first place where cracks begin to show. What once worked with a single warehouse, a handful of markets and manageable order volumes quickly becomes a bottleneck as international demand, delivery expectations and returns volumes increase.

One thing’s for sure: fulfilment is no longer just a back-office function for ambitious brands in the fashion space. It’s a defining part of how businesses scale, compete and protect margins.