There is a gap widening in commerce operations. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with which platforms you are on or how many channels you have added, which would be an easy fix.
It is a data and coordination gap.
Integrating online and offline channels remains the most significant strategic hurdle for commerce operations, cited by 51% of organizations, up from 44% the previous year. Inventory positioning, demand planning, and logistics costs are each cited by 53% of respondents as primary pain points, highlighting how broadly the complexity has distributed itself across the operation rather than concentrating in one place. Only 6% of companies report full end-to-end supply chain visibility.
Those numbers have been in the same range for several years. What is changing is the consequence of staying there.
The Coordination Model Has Become the Growth Constraint
Most commerce operations were not designed for the number of moving parts they are now managing. A mid-size retailer today might be running a DTC site, several marketplace integrations, a wholesale program, and a dropship network, all simultaneously, often with supplier relationships that were never fully systematized in the first place. Each channel added headcount. Each new supplier added a workflow. Each exception added a process.
The result is an operation held together by a combination of technology and human coordination that made sense when the volume was manageable. 41% of operations and supply chain leaders cite poor data quality and system integration as their top barrier to progress, not strategy, not investment, not technology access. The infrastructure they have is not producing the data quality they need to make decisions confidently at the speed the market now requires.
Supplier quality data rarely lives in one place. Audit results, nonconformances, certifications, and performance metrics are often scattered across multiple systems, or worse, spreadsheets and email threads. For organizations managing hundreds of supplier relationships, that fragmentation means that the answer to basic operational questions — is this supplier performing? is this inventory claim accurate? will this order ship on time? — requires manual aggregation that slows every decision downstream.
Mature programs that have addressed this report 15 to 25% lower inventory costs, 8 to 15% total supply chain cost reduction, and 30 to 50% shorter order fulfillment cycles. The gap between organizations that have systematized their data foundation and those that haven’t is not a gap in ambition. It is a gap in operational infrastructure.
What 2027 Will Require
The organizations that are going to be well-positioned heading into 2027 share a set of operational characteristics that are worth being honest about if you don’t have them yet.
- A single version of the truth on inventory.Â
Leading suppliers are moving from channel-specific operations teams to unified fulfillment approaches, treating “an order is an order” as their operating principle and investing in systems that provide single-pane visibility across all channels rather than managing each channel separately. The organizations still running separate views of inventory across their DTC, marketplace, and wholesale channels are absorbing reconciliation overhead that compounds with every new channel added.
- Supplier data that is current, not periodic.
Supplier quality is moving from periodic audits to continuous monitoring. The organizations that know the state of their supplier network in real time — compliance status, performance metrics, inventory positions, lead time accuracy — are making fundamentally different sourcing and fulfillment decisions than the ones waiting for quarterly reviews to surface problems that have been compounding for months.
- Fulfillment infrastructure built for distributed complexity.Â
Omnichannel fulfillment now requires companies to manage orders from multiple locations simultaneously, including warehouses, stores, dark stores, and distribution centers, with distributed order management systems coordinating inventory and operational capacity to ensure each order ships from the most efficient location. That coordination used to be a differentiator. By 2027, it will be a baseline expectation. 74% of shippers say they would switch 3PL providers based on technology and operational flexibility capabilities alone. The tolerance for fulfillment partners who cannot demonstrate real-time visibility and flexible execution is shrinking fast.
- Data that supports confident decisions at speed.Â
47% of organizations face integration complexity and 44% struggle with data quality as their primary barriers to operational progress. Both problems share the same root cause: data that lives in too many places, in too many formats, with too many manual handoffs between them. The organizations closing that gap are not doing it by adding more systems. They are doing it by consolidating the connections between the systems they already have.
The Honest Assessment
The question most commerce operations need to ask heading into 2027 is not which new capabilities to add. It is whether the foundation underneath the existing operation is solid enough to support the decisions being made on top of it.
Poor data quality across supply chain systems reduces forecasting accuracy, delays procurement decisions, increases inventory imbalances, disrupts warehouse operations, and slows customer fulfillment. These are not edge cases. They are the daily reality of operations that have accumulated complexity faster than the data infrastructure underneath could keep up.
Getting the house in order before 2027 means taking a clear-eyed look at where data is fragmented, where human coordination is compensating for system gaps, and where the operational decisions being made today are built on information that may not reflect current reality. The organizations that do that work now will be in a fundamentally different position when the market demands faster, more confident execution at greater scale.
The Autonomous Commerce Operations playbook covers the full operational picture, including the data foundation diagnostic, the supplier and fulfillment infrastructure requirements, and the maturity framework for benchmarking where your organization actually stands. Download it here.