Retail logistics pain points coalesce
Last‑mile delivery, poor inventory visibility in WMS integrations, and dark‑store fulfilment models are rising as core headaches for e‑commerce and retail logistics teams. These themes are being highlighted on social channels as common causes of oversells, stockouts, returns, and last‑minute transportation fixes. (x.com) (x.com) (x.com)
Retailers are hitting the same bottlenecks at once: the final delivery leg, patchy stock data between systems, and stores turned into mini-warehouses. (sap.com) (manh.com) (shopify.com) Last-mile delivery is the doorstep segment of an order, and SAP said in a 2025 explainer that it accounts for at least half of total delivery cost. Ryder separately describes it as the hardest stage to run efficiently because parcels move to individual addresses, not dense retail stops. (sap.com) (ryder.com) Warehouse management systems are the software that tracks goods moving through a facility, and Manhattan Associates says retailers use them to keep a real-time view from inbound receiving to outbound shipping. When that view breaks across warehouse, order, and store systems, retailers can promise items that are not actually available. (manh.com 1) (manh.com 2) Dark stores are retail sites closed to walk-in shoppers and used only to pick and dispatch online orders. Shopify says the model is built for local delivery and pickup, but it also shifts stores deeper into warehouse-style work. (shopify.com) (manh.com) Those three problems meet in one transaction: a shopper sees an item online, a system promises fast delivery, a local node picks it, and a carrier has to finish the route. If inventory is late to update or a pick fails, the result is often an oversell, a substitution, or a refund. (manh.com) (ryder.com) Returns make the math worse. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns said on December 5, 2024 that retailers expected $890 billion in merchandise returns in 2024, equal to 16.9% of annual sales. (nrf.com) Supply-chain executives are spending more to fix that coordination problem. MHI and Deloitte said in their 2025 annual industry report that 55% of supply-chain leaders are increasing their supply-chain technology and innovation investments, with end-to-end orchestration moving higher on the agenda. (mhi.org) (businesswire.com) Software vendors are pitching one shared inventory picture as the answer. Manhattan says its warehouse and order tools are designed to give retailers dynamic inventory visibility and fulfillment orchestration across warehouses and stores, while Blue Yonder markets an end-to-end platform spanning warehouse, transportation, order management, and returns. (manh.com) (blueyonder.com) Retailers still have to decide where speed pays for itself. Same-day and next-day promises can lift conversion, but every rushed handoff between store stock, pickers, and carriers raises the odds of stockouts, split shipments, and last-minute delivery fixes. (sap.com) (manh.com) The thread running through all of it is simple: the closer retailers move inventory to the customer, the less room they have for bad data. When the stock file is wrong by one unit, the delivery van, the return label, and the customer complaint tend to arrive together. (manh.com) (nrf.com)
