IN Brief:
- Incisiv surveyed 240 enterprise leaders for research sponsored by Reveel.
- Fifty-six per cent of respondents manage at least three parcel carriers.
- Technology adoption remains ahead of real-time pricing, governance, and credit-recovery processes.
Enterprise parcel shippers are adding technology and carriers, but many continue to review pricing and performance too slowly for a market where surcharges, service rules, and network coverage can change throughout the year, according to research sponsored by Reveel.
The State of Enterprise Shipping 2026 study was conducted by Incisiv and surveyed 240 logistics, supply chain, finance, procurement, and information-technology leaders across retail, apparel and footwear, life sciences, automotive, manufacturing, and third-party logistics.
Reveel sells parcel-spend and shipping-intelligence technology, giving the study a clear commercial context. Its findings should not be treated as a complete census of enterprise shipping, although the published sample provides useful benchmarks where the results describe gaps between installed systems and the management processes using them.
Carrier diversification is widespread among respondents. Fifty-six per cent manage three or more parcel carriers, while 22% use at least six. Multiple carriers can provide regional coverage, capacity, service alternatives, and negotiating leverage, but they also multiply rate cards, invoices, surcharges, data formats, and performance measures.
Automation does not guarantee faster decisions
The report found that 41% review carrier changes only periodically or rarely, despite frequent adjustments to rates, surcharges, and service rules. Only 13% benchmark prices outside the annual general-rate-increase and contract cycle.
A procurement process built around one yearly negotiation can therefore remain unchanged while the effective cost per parcel moves through dimensional rules, delivery-area charges, handling fees, fuel mechanisms, and service adjustments.
Finance visibility appears particularly limited. Ninety-two per cent of finance teams in the study lack real-time access to shipping expenses, leaving accruals, margin calculations, customer pricing, and forecasts dependent on delayed invoices or historical assumptions.
Technology adoption is not absent. Three-quarters of respondents said they had standardised or automated carrier selection, but only 10% used dynamic optimisation that adapts in real time. A routing rule can automatically choose a carrier and still make a poor choice when its prices, capacity assumptions, or delivery-performance data are outdated.
Governance provides another gap. Three out of four organisations reportedly lack a cross-functional approach to shipping-spend control, even though parcel decisions involve distribution, procurement, finance, customer service, ecommerce, information technology, and sales.
Those functions do not always share the same objective. Operations may prioritise service continuity, finance may focus on cost, and sales teams may promise delivery options without seeing the accessorial charges generated by the chosen service.
The report says 86% make decisions without regular insight into actual carrier conditions. Service failures may consequently be examined after they affect customers rather than being incorporated into routing decisions. Only 10% use processes that automatically recover eligible service credits.
Reveel also says three-quarters of organisations typically fail to secure credits before they expire. That figure comes from the sponsor rather than the independent survey and should be assessed separately from the respondent data.
Businesses using the report should examine the questionnaire, respondent mix, organisation sizes, shipment volumes, and definitions before applying the percentages directly. A retailer shipping lightweight consumer parcels and a manufacturer sending costly replacement parts may use the same carriers while operating under markedly different economics.
The central operational issue remains credible: installing software does not ensure that decisions become timely. Data must be current, ownership must be clear, and teams need authority to change routing, challenge invoices, or renegotiate terms.
The study describes a market that has moved beyond single-carrier dependence and manual selection, but has not consistently built continuous pricing, finance, and governance processes around the resulting network. The technology layer may be modern; the decision cycle remains stubbornly periodic.