Most peak-season failures begin days before anyone notices them, as small signals in the data: a supplier that stopped confirming shipments, a feed that pushed products into the wrong category, a SKU that sold through faster than its inventory updated. The retailers and brands that protect the season are the ones who see those signals while there is still time to act.
That is what holiday readiness means in 2026, and it is why Logicbroker built Intelligent Reporting and Reports Agent.
Intelligent Reporting gives every user a real-time, drillable view of their retailer-supplier network, while Reports Agent lets anyone ask a question about their commerce data in plain English and get a built report back.
Below is how commerce teams can put both to work across the full season, from October’s early spike to January’s returns.
The 2026 Season Leaves Little Room for Error
Adobe expects U.S. consumers to spend a record $275.1 billion online this holiday season, up 6.7% year over year, with Cyber Week alone driving $47.5 billion. Across all channels, the National Retail Federation forecasts November and December retail sales will grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion.
That volume lands in a narrow window this year with UPS expecting its U.S. volume to jump about 24% from Q3 to Q4, with its highest peak charges running November 22 through December 26.
Shoppers and marketplaces give retailers very little slack inside that window:
- Delivery promises carry the most weight. 70% of shoppers say an accurate delivery date at checkout is very important when making a holiday purchase, the highest-rated factor in Narvar’s survey.
- Stockouts top the frustration list. 41% of shoppers named out-of-stock items as their worst shopping experience of the past year.
- Marketplaces enforce performance. Walmart’s seller performance standards track cancellation rate, on-time delivery, valid tracking and late shipment rate, and Walmart can suspend sellers who fall short.
Unfortunately, all most all organizations are not built to react at that speed. Gartner found that 95% of supply chain organizations feel pressure to respond to disruptions in real time, while only 7% of supply chain leaders report the ability to execute decisions in real time.
For retailers running dropship and marketplace programs, much of that risk sits with suppliers they don’t control directly. Seeing supplier performance as it happens is the difference between a problem caught and a problem escalated.
Two Tools, One Real-Time View of Your Network
Intelligent Reporting and Reports Agent divide the work of seeing a commerce network clearly. Intelligent Reporting surfaces the problems you didn’t know to look for, while Reports Agent answers the questions you already have.
Intelligent Reporting
Intelligent Reporting replaces the legacy Advanced Reporting experience directly inside the Logicbroker portal, with no separate tool and no new login. Its dashboards reflect the live state of the network in real time, spotting trends, highlighting exceptions and making it obvious where attention is needed first. Anomaly alerts notify users when a metric moves outside machine learning expected results or thresholds they define.
- Drill-down and change analysis. Move from a network-wide overview into a single supplier, product, feed or category, and see what shifted, when and by how much without exporting to a spreadsheet.
- Self-serve report builder. Any user can build, filter and save custom reports without code or a ticket to a data team.
- Pre-built templates. Order performance, fulfillment rates, exception tracking and supplier scorecards are ready out of the box.
- Role-relevant dashboards. Retailers, brands and suppliers each log in to a home screen built for their position in the network.
- Role-based access controls. Administrators scope data visibility by role across the trading partner network.
Reports Agent
Reports Agent is a conversational AI built directly into the Logicbroker platform. Anyone on your team can ask a business question in plain language and get a live answer drawn from the commerce network, with a built report to back it up. It queries order events, inventory, products, COGS and supplier performance in real time, so there is no report to build, no query language to learn and no request to file with a data team.
Most reporting tools stop at the dashboards someone else built, and any question outside them means exporting data into a separate BI tool. Reports Agent answers brand-new questions live, inside the platform where the data already lives.
Two modes cover the two kinds of questions teams ask most:
- Quick Search handles instant lookups, such as today’s order volume or one supplier’s cancellations in the last 24 hours.
- Deep Analysis investigates trends over time, such as which suppliers have shown declining performance over the last six months.
Every answer can start a conversation. Threaded follow-up questions let users narrow, regroup or compare results without starting over.
Reports Agent for Every Role
Reports Agent works for every user in a retailer-supplier network, from the executive checking on the program to the operations manager working through today’s exceptions:
- VP of eCommerce: “How does this month’s GMV compare to the same month last year?”
- Head of Merchandising: “Which suppliers dropped in volume compared to last quarter?”
- Category Manager: “What are the top-selling products by category this month?”
- Dropship Operations Manager: “Are there any suppliers with a spike in cancellations right now?”
Reports Agent delivers insight rather than taking action on your behalf. It tells you what is happening and why, with enough specificity to act on, and your team decides what to do next.
Before the Surge: Treat October as Your Dress Rehearsal
Adobe expects $95.8 billion in U.S. online spending in October, up 8%, and says the October Prime event has reshaped the season by forcing retailers to plan promotions and inventory around an extra pre-season spike. Deloitte’s 2026 Holiday Retail Survey found the share of holiday budgets expected to be spent by the end of October is the highest in six years.
That means your network has already been through its first stress test of the season, and the results are sitting in your data.
What Intelligent Reporting shows: Run change analysis on October against September to see which suppliers’ ship times, fill rates or exception volumes shifted during the Prime event week of October 6. Drill into any supplier that moved to see whether the problem was isolated to a few SKUs or spread across their catalog.
What to ask Reports Agent:
- “Which suppliers missed their ship-by dates during the week of October 6?”
- Follow-up: “Show me only the top 20 by order volume.”
- Follow-up: “Which of those suppliers are in our highest-growth categories for Cyber Week?”
Then clean up the data before volume hits
Whatever October reveals, the window to act on it is short. Every week a new supplier or product spends in onboarding is a week of holiday demand it can’t capture, and shoppers are spending earlier than they have in years. Logicbroker gives retailers and suppliers the tools to get assortment and inventory where they need to be before Black Friday.
On the catalog side, the Product Onboarding Center now imports large feeds with hundreds of columns and mapping rules faster, and auto-approved attributes keep catalogs with hundreds of attributes current without approving each change by hand. Enforce Category Matching stops products with invalid categories at import, so suppliers fix bad data before it ever reaches the site. Suppliers can also bulk edit listings in My Catalog to prepare multiple products for syndication at once, and teams can save catalog views with the exact column layout they work in.
On the inventory side, custom fields capture the additional data your business needs, and inventory exports filter by supplier group so each team pulls only the suppliers it manages.
Accurate product data carries more weight this season because more shoppers are arriving through AI assistants that read it. Adobe projects AI traffic to U.S. retail sites will rise 130%, and AI referrals converted 31% better than other traffic during the 2025 holidays.
Peak of Peak: Know First, November 22 to December 27
From the week before Thanksgiving through the week after Christmas, carrier rates are at their highest, order volume is at its heaviest and every late shipment counts against marketplace performance. The job in this window is finding problems in hours instead of days.
What Intelligent Reporting shows: A real-time view of exceptions across the network, with the issues that need attention first made obvious. Drill from the network view into a single supplier, category or feed, and use change analysis to see exactly what shifted since yesterday. Anomaly alerts, set on machine learning expected results or your own thresholds, notify the team the moment a supplier’s cancellations or exceptions move outside the normal range, so nobody has to keep refreshing a dashboard on Cyber Monday.
What to ask Reports Agent:
- “Which suppliers have orders past their ship-by date right now?”
- Follow-up: “Which of those also have inventory that hasn’t updated today?”
- Follow-up: “Group them by category and sort by open order value.”
Self-serve matters most when teams are stretched
Peak runs on lean teams. NRF reports that retailers are taking a measured approach to seasonal hiring this year amid persistent inflation, higher interest rates and elevated consumer debt. When an operations manager needs an answer on Cyber Monday, submitting a report request to a data team and waiting is not an option. With Reports Agent, the manager asks the question directly and has a report in front of them in moments.
Suppliers benefit the same way. In Intelligent Reporting, suppliers see their own order status, fill rates, exception volumes and fulfillment trends inside each retailer’s network. A supplier that spots its own late shipments can correct them without waiting for the retailer to call, and every self-corrected issue is one less escalation on the retailer’s desk during the busiest weeks of the year.
Two more platform updates are built for peak-volume conditions:
- Failed Document Report at high volume. The report is now optimized for accounts with high document volume, loading quickly where large result sets previously caused timeouts.
- Faster supplier triage in Scorecards. A new partner grouping filter shows only the partners each user is responsible for, and vendor number export speeds up supplier performance follow-up.
After the Surge: Settle Up and Plan for 2027
January brings its own workload. In the most recent NRF and Happy Returns Retail Returns Landscape report, retailers said they expect 17% of holiday sales to be returned, consistent with previous years. B-Stock estimated 2025 holiday returns at roughly $160 billion, with processing a return costing around 30% of an item’s original price.
The post-season review is also when retailers decide which suppliers earn more of next year’s assortment and which need a performance conversation.
What Intelligent Reporting shows: Season-over-season change analysis across every supplier, category and channel, plus supplier scorecard templates that turn holiday performance into a clear record.
What to ask Reports Agent:
- “Which suppliers drove the most late orders in December, and how does that compare to last year?”
- Follow-up: “Which of them had the highest cancellation rates during Cyber Week?”
- Follow-up: “Build a report of those suppliers with their order volume and on-time rate for the season.”
Paired with the new partner grouping filter and vendor number export in Scorecards, those answers become the basis for supplier reviews and the decisions that shape your 2027 program.
Why Network Position Matters Most at Peak
A retailer-side analytics tool can only see what the retailer sees, and a supplier-side system can only see what the supplier sees. During peak, the problems that hurt most live in the space between them: the order that was routed but never acknowledged, the shipment confirmed late, the inventory update that never arrived.
Logicbroker sits at the intersection of the retailer and the supplier. The platform processes the orders, routes the exceptions and coordinates the fulfillment activity moving across the network in real time. Intelligent Reporting and Reports Agent draw on that complete retailer-supplier picture for every order, every supplier and every channel, which no analytics layer added on top of a disconnected stack can reassemble from fragments.
“Supply chain complexity has grown faster than most teams’ ability to understand it in real time,” said Omar Qari, CEO of Logicbroker. “At Logicbroker, we’ve always believed that visibility and control go hand in hand, and that both should be accessible to every user, not just analysts. Intelligent Reporting is our commitment to making that a reality: giving retailers, brands, and their partners the intelligence they need, precisely when they need it, without the overhead.”
Get Holiday Ready With Intelligent Reporting and Reports Agent
Intelligent Reporting and Reports Agent are available now within the Logicbroker platform for existing customers. The fastest way to start is with the data you already have: open Intelligent Reporting and look at how your network handled October, or ask Reports Agent which suppliers need attention before Black Friday.
To learn more or connect with a member of the team, visit logicbroker.com. For more on how Logicbroker supports dropship and marketplace programs through peak and beyond, explore the Logicbroker resource library.