In July 2025, Walmart’s global chief technology officer, Suresh Kumar, said the company had been building AI agents quickly for every part of the business, including one dedicated to the suppliers, sellers, and advertisers it works with.
Really, only a select few retailers can take that route. As Digital Commerce 360 noted in its 2026 Leading Vendors report, most retailers don’t have the internal resources of Amazon and Walmart, which is why technology providers compete to serve everyone else.
For the rest of the market, running drop ship and marketplace programs comes down to a practical question: how much of the work stays inside the business, and how much goes to a partner? Both models can work, and each has limits that show up in predictable places as a program grows.
Earlier this year, we looked at why operations become the ceiling on assortment growth and why retailers end up trading growth against cost control. This post weighs the two operating models most retailers choose between.
The case for keeping operations in-house
An in-house team knows the retailer’s suppliers, standards, and customers better than anyone outside can. Supplier relationships stay direct, data stays inside the business, and when a problem comes up, the people who understand the program can fix it without routing a request through a vendor.
The limit is how quickly capacity arrives. SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking data puts the median time to fill a role at about a month and a half, rising to 61 days for nonexecutive roles at organizations with 5,000 or more employees. Nearly 7 in 10 organizations report difficulty recruiting for full-time positions. For a team preparing for a holiday supplier wave, a role opened in September may not be filled until November, and the new hire still has to learn the program before they’re fully productive.
Even when hiring goes smoothly, each new person tends to cover roughly the volume the next group of suppliers adds, so headcount grows on the same line as the program. And in-house capacity is hardest to stretch when demand spikes. Home goods brand Coyuchi saw online sales run 400% above forecast during a critical holiday period, which exposed the limits of its in-house operation. It turned to a third-party fulfillment provider that could flex labor across its network to absorb the surge.
What outsourcing gets right
Outsourcing is now standard practice across all industries. In Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey of more than 500 executives, 96% of organizations use third-party outsourcing, and 56% now outsource front-office and core functions such as order fulfillment and customer service.
The reasons have shifted. In 2020, 70% of organizations cited cost savings as the main reason to outsource. By 2024, that figure was 34%, and the most common driver was improved access to talent, cited by 42%.
In commerce, outsourcing covers a wide range: platforms that connect and manage supplier integrations, onboarding services that bring new suppliers live, managed marketplace operations, and third-party fulfillment.
Major retailers lean on these options too. Best Buy and Ulta Beauty both launched online marketplaces in 2025 using a third-party marketplace platform rather than building their own. Done well, outsourcing gives a retailer specialist skills, capacity that can grow faster than a hiring plan, and room to scale up for peak without carrying that headcount all year.
Where outsourcing falls short
The same Deloitte survey shows where outsourcing relationships tend to break down. The most common challenges were a lack of tracking and reporting on whether the promised benefits materialized (55%), inadequate change management (53%), poor integration of vendor services with the operating model (47%), and weak vendor performance during transitions (46%).
Many organizations are also pulling some work back. 70% have insourced part of a previously outsourced scope in the past five years, most often to gain better control over service quality and performance (68%) and to build strategic capabilities in-house (64%). Deloitte notes that the shift usually reflects a desire for more control and balance rather than dissatisfaction with providers.
Automation is raising a newer question. 83% of executives expect their vendors to bring AI into how they deliver services, but less than half are seeing productivity gains from it, and only about a quarter are seeing lower costs for vendor services. If a provider’s tools make the work faster, the savings don’t always reach the client.
Cost structure matters, too, as Deloitte describes managed services as typically priced on outcomes and volume consumption, which means the bill tends to rise with every supplier, SKU, and order a program adds. And in the most extreme cases, outsourcing doesn’t save the channel at all: UK retailer The Works stopped selling online in March 2026 after problems with two successive third-party fulfillment partners.
What to look for in a commerce operations partner
The gaps above are consistent enough to work as a checklist. A strong partner for drop ship and marketplace operations should meet four tests:
- It works on your platform and your data. Supplier, order, and performance data should stay visible to your team in real time, so you keep the control that drives most insourcing decisions.
- It’s measured on outcomes, not hours. Deloitte found that 67% of organizations now use managed or operate services, up from 45% two years earlier, and that buyers increasingly want capabilities and outcomes rather than hours. Yet only 14% align with providers on specific shared outcomes. Ask what a partner is accountable for: supplier go-live time, on-time shipping, exception rates.
- It passes efficiency gains back to you. If automation makes the work faster, your pricing should reflect it.
- Its cost doesn’t climb in lockstep with your supplier count. Adding suppliers should add volume to your program, not a proportional line on your invoice.
The right partner also leaves the decisions that define your brand with you. When Ulta launched its marketplace, it limited participation to brands it invited, which it said helps keep product quality and service consistent. A partner should make that kind of control easier to exercise, not harder.
Where Logicbroker fits
Logicbroker works with enterprise retailers as that kind of partner today. Drop ship and marketplace programs run on one platform connected to a network of suppliers, with supplier onboarding and product onboarding built in, so your team works from the same supplier, order, and inventory data that powers the program.
The platform is designed so that adding suppliers adds volume to the program without adding the same amount of manual work for your team. Decisions about assortment, supplier standards, and customer experience stay with you, while the operational load stays manageable as the program grows.
With the right partner, the line between outsourced and in-house starts to disappear. Deloitte describes the most mature outsourcing relationships, which it calls operate services, as highly collaborative and often viewed as an extension of the organization. That’s the standard a commerce operations partner should meet: the platform and the people running your supplier operations work inside your program, against your standards, with your team seeing everything they see.
In practice, your suppliers experience one consistent program, your merchants and operations leaders get the same visibility they’d have with an internal team, and the knowledge built up running the program lives in the platform your team uses every day. You get the capacity and specialist skills that make outsourcing attractive, with the control and continuity of an in-house operation.
If you’re weighing how to staff the next phase of a drop ship or marketplace program, our team can walk through what each model would look like for your operation.