EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Gartner sees data as key to fulfillment success
Retailers seeking to maximize their fulfillment and delivery performance should focus on analysis of consumer and product data.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Chap Achen, senior director, analyst in the Gartner supply chain practice, about how retailers can leverage technology and strategy to ensure fulfillment and delivery are executed in a profitable, efficient and customer-centric manner.
How can retailers leverage supply chain data during product discovery to reduce unprofitable fulfillment outcomes?
Leading retailers are using inventory data in search to curate customer search results based on inventory position. This includes prompting customers for their location to tailor assortment, delivery speed and click and collect and buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS).
Retailers are also filtering search results based on ‘items near me’ or ‘items in my store.’ These localized filtering features are now mainstream among North American specialty retailers, supporting quicker product fulfillment for the customer and lower logistics overhead for the retailer.
How can retailers personalize delivery offers?
Instead of having one standard free shipping ground offer, they can offer multiple date-based choices based on the consumer’s location. Retailers should personalize the free shipping offer to what is in the cart; single-item shipments are a margin killer for retailers, so why not base free shipping on dollar and item count?
Delivery offers can be dynamic based on customer attributes such as lapsed customer, loyalty member, and first-time buyer. Retailers should evaluate a consumer's cart, not just the items in it, to make a shipping time promise.
Why offer fast shipping on a stocked item when the cart also has three items drop-shipping from other suppliers? The consumer is looking for all the items in the cart to arrive at the same time, so retailers should optimize against that outcome.
Retailers should look at the fulfillment history of a consumer. If they have never tried BOPIS and they live close to store, why not create a personalized offer to get them to try it?
How can retailers maximize delivery promise accuracy?
The consumer is asking for accuracy. In a June 2025 Gartner consumer survey, 52% of respondents said that is more important that delivery fits into their schedule than arrives quickly.
For retailers to meet this consumer need, they should ensure that promising rules for estimated delivery dates are connected to the order routing rules so that the upstream promising system is making its delivery promises based on the ideal fulfillment locations.
Retailers can leverage predictive models that look at historical processing and shipping times and can predict with 98% accuracy what the delivery promise should be.
What do you see as the biggest digital fulfillment trends of 2026?
Retailers will continue to improve upon delivery accuracy by shifting from shipping windows to a specific delivery date delivered on the product detail page. This has consistently shown a conversion lift of 3 to 7%.
[READ MORE: Gartner: The top supply chain technology trends for 2025 are…]
I also expect to see continued retailer investment in becoming more dynamic with supply chain data to personalize and optimize fulfillment offers. As I mentioned, filtering results for items in a customer’s store is near-ubiquitous among North American specialty retailers, and I expect to see this trend continue across the fashion and footwear segments.
