The truck that arrives at your door is increasingly unlikely to be brown or purple. It may instead be a Honda Civic with a phone mounted to the windshield, or a van displaying a brand you have never seen. Retailers have made that choice, and the reason has more to do with the clock than with the rate card.

Consumers now say they will wait a maximum of 2.6 days for free shipping, down from 3.4 days that had held steady for years, according to AlixPartners’ 14th annual Home Delivery Survey, released in June. Meeting that expectation has turned last-mile carrier diversification from a procurement tactic into the operating default. The survey found that 55% of retailers are using carriers outside FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, and more than a third are actively shifting volume away from FedEx and UPS.

The consequences extend beyond freight expense. Some 88% of shoppers told AlixPartners that a late delivery accompanied only by an apology weakens or ends their willingness to buy from that retailer again. That puts roughly 20% of demand at risk. Meanwhile, 83% of executives said per-package costs rose year over year, and most said home delivery does not improve profitability.

AlixPartners surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers and 100 North American transportation, logistics and supply chain executives at companies with sales of $100 million or more.

The retreat was deliberate

Amazon handled 6.7 billion parcels in 2025, up 9.8%, passing the Postal Service to become the largest domestic parcel carrier by volume, according to data published in March by ShipMatrix Inc. USPS volume fell 8.3% to 6.6 billion. UPS volume dropped 8.3% to 4.4 billion. FedEx delivered 3.6 billion packages, up 5.9%.

Total industry volume was nearly flat, rising 0.4% to 23.9 billion packages. Volume at alternative carriers — including UniUni, Veho, Gofo, Jitsu, SpeedX, OnTrac and Better Trucks — rose 13% to 2.6 billion units. Revenue for that group increased 15.4%.

None of that growth went to UPS and FedEx. Both companies are moving away from commodity last-mile delivery to pursue B2B logistics and higher-value e-commerce shipments, where they can charge more for complexity. The challenge is mathematical: business-to-consumer traffic now accounts for 75% of the parcel market, while the B2B segment they are pursuing represents 25%.

The shift appears in pricing. Ground parcel rates ran 34% above the 2018 baseline during last year’s peak season, and the average surcharge increased 13% from the third quarter to the fourth, according to the TD Cowen/AFS Freight Index. Both carriers implemented a 5.9% general rate increase for 2026. Ground fuel surcharges rose 26% year over year, while tracked diesel prices rose 4.7%.

“Record-high rates do not spell good news for shippers, but there is still room for pricing concessions if shippers know where to look and what buttons to push,” said Mingshu Bates, chief analytics officer and president of parcel at AFS Logistics, in a news release.

Why carrier diversification became the default

More than 90% of executives surveyed by AlixPartners now use a mix of last-mile carriers, and 32% use four or more. What once was a hedge has become infrastructure.

The carriers absorbing that volume are building for it intentionally. Veho relies on 120,000 crowdsourced drivers using their own vehicles and delivers in nearly 60 markets for Macy’s, Lululemon, Sephora, HelloFresh and Stitch Fix, along with logistics providers including Flexport, ShipBob, ShipHero and Stord. In February, the company introduced FlexSave, which lets shippers trade day-definite delivery for a wider delivery window at a lower rate, routed by a platform Veho calls MaestroAI.

“The ever-increasing shipping rates have put brands in an impossible ‘Catch-22’: pay hefty, unsustainable shipping fees, or bear the cost of slow and low-quality delivery that erodes the customer trust,” said Veho co-founder and CEO Itamar Zur in the announcement. “FlexSave gives brands and logistics leaders a new, better path: a highly cost-effective delivery that keeps the brand promise intact.”

That message resonates because the alternative keeps getting more expensive. E-retailers face legacy carriers raising rates by roughly 6% annually and adding surcharges that function as profit centers, according to Veho and parcel industry analysts.

Reliability overtakes price

A more telling finding in this year’s AlixPartners data is not the 55%. It is that reliability has edged past cost as the top reason executives choose their primary last-mile carrier. Procurement teams spent two decades optimizing for cost per package. They now have to optimize for consistency.

Amazon set that benchmark and continues to raise it. The company added one-hour and three-hour delivery windows this year, priced at $9.99 and $4.99 for Prime members, covering 90,000 SKUs across hundreds of cities. It also invested $4 billion in its rural delivery network, while FedEx and UPS impose remote delivery surcharges of $16.50 and $16.75.

Parcel analyst Nate Skiver described the mechanism in a LinkedIn post: Amazon creates demand with fast delivery, which builds package density, which lowers unit costs, which enables faster delivery, which creates more demand.

That flywheel sets the standard every other retailer must answer to, whether it competes with Amazon directly or not. AlixPartners found that 90% of consumers want notification when an order will run late, along with an updated arrival time, and 68% of executives named ETA accuracy their top AI priority for the next two to three years.

The orchestration problem

Running four to 12 carriers is more of a technology problem than a procurement one. Maersk, which spent decades moving containers, built its parcel business around that idea after acquiring Visible Supply Chain Management and B2C Europe.

“Our multi-carrier network allows us to flex capacity significantly. I don’t need to load and plan for that because I know I can move it,” Sam Coiro, head of e-commerce commercial business development at Maersk, told FreightWaves in March. “If we relied on a single asset, that would create constraints.”

Maersk issues one label with two barcodes, one for tracking and one identifying the assigned carrier. If that carrier runs into trouble, the system reassigns the package without the shipper needing to intervene.

“If a carrier experiences a service disruption, our system may reroute shipments through alternative providers where commercially and operationally feasible,” Coiro said. “You as the customer, you know what you have to do? Nothing. I do it.”

Most shippers do not have Maersk’s balance sheet, which is why the orchestration layer has become its own market. Ben Emmrich, founder and CEO of Tusk Logistics, told FreightWaves in February that his company gives shippers a virtual national network assembled from multiple regional carriers, then monitors performance and shifts volume to balance cost against quality.

“Shippers are faced with a complex carrier environment where costs are rising quickly, their resources, bandwidth and tooling are limited, and the path to lower cost per unit needs to go through either more effective carrier negotiations, carrier diversification or a combo of the two,” Emmrich said. “It’s hard to be a shipper in 2026.”

Why it matters: Retailers that still rely primarily on FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service are competing against a new delivery standard of free shipping in 2.6 days, while more than half of their peers have already diversified to alternative carriers to protect reliability and margins. The shift has moved last-mile strategy from a back-office cost exercise to a core factor in customer retention and profitability.

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