In the 2026 Annual Third-Party Logistics Study, 55% of shippers described their relationships with logistics providers as strategic. When researchers looked at how those relationships actually worked, only 5% met the bar.
Commerce operations have a similar gap. Most retailers running dropship and marketplace programs rely on technology partners for the platform, then staff the operational work around it themselves. The partner provides the system, and the retailer’s team does most of the work inside it. That division of labor made sense when commerce software mainly stored and routed data, and it’s worth revisiting now that partners can take on far more.
Technology partners are starting to do the work
The software behind commerce operations is changing what it can take on. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. In July, Gartner went further, saying agentic systems deliver outcomes directly rather than through software interfaces, and that vendors will need to shift from interface-based value to outcome-based value.
Working with specialists also tends to beat building alone, as MIT’s 2025 study of enterprise AI found that tools purchased from specialized vendors and built through partnerships succeed about 67% of the time, far more often than internal builds.
For commerce operations, the useful question to ask a technology partner is shifting from what the software lets your team do to what the partner’s systems will handle on their own, such as monitoring supplier feeds, flagging late shipments, and routing exceptions before someone on your team has to go looking for them.
Service partners can run defined parts of the operation
The second type of partner brings people and expertise along with the technology.
Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey found that 67% of organizations now use managed or operate services, up from 45% two years earlier, as buyers look for capabilities and outcomes rather than hours. Deloitte describes the most mature of these relationships as highly collaborative and often viewed as an extension of the organization.
In commerce, service partners can take ownership of work that requires specialist knowledge and steady attention: bringing suppliers through onboarding, keeping product data aligned with catalog standards, and managing program performance against the retailer’s service levels. The retailer sets the standards, and the partner carries the day-to-day load of meeting them.
Logistics partners show where this leads
Supply chain teams have handed physical operations to partners for decades, which makes logistics the clearest benchmark for what deeper partnerships can deliver. The 2027 Third-Party Logistics Study, released in October 2026, found that 97% of shippers consider their 3PL relationships successful and 93% credit their providers with improving service. 73% say their providers bring new and innovative solutions.
Shippers are also leaning in further with over 86% increasing their use of outsourced logistics services, and 74% reporting consolidation around fewer partners, up from 50% a year earlier. The value they see has shifted, too: the share crediting 3PLs with reducing overall costs fell to 52% from 75%, as priorities moved toward service and resilience.
The lesson for commerce operations is that the strongest partnerships are built on what a partner improves, with cost savings as one part of the picture rather than the whole case.
Why most partnerships stay transactional
If partnerships deliver that kind of value, the gap between 55% and 5% needs an explanation. Two barriers come up repeatedly.
The first is data. In the 2027 study, data quality and availability (61%) and legacy system integration (54%) were the top barriers to scaling AI across shippers and their partners. A partner can only run what it can see, and many retailers still keep supplier, order, and inventory data in systems their partners can’t reach.
The second is measurement. Deloitte found that only 14% of organizations align with providers on specific shared outcomes as a measure of value. Without shared goals, even a capable partner ends up managed like a vendor: judged on uptime and invoices instead of on whether the operation is improving.
How to get more from your commerce partners
The retailers getting the most from their partners tend to make a few deliberate choices:
- Consolidate around fewer, deeper partners. Fewer handoffs between systems and teams means fewer places for supplier issues to fall through.Â
- Give partners the data they need. Shared visibility into supplier, order, and inventory data lets a partner act on problems instead of waiting to be told about them.Â
- Measure partners on outcomes. Agree on targets like supplier go-live time, on-time shipment rates, and exception resolution, and review them together.Â
- Look at where your team’s time goes. Hours spent watching dashboards and chasing routine follow-ups often signal work a partner’s systems or specialists could carry.Â
- Treat the relationship as strategic in practice. Bring partners into planning for new categories and supplier expansion, not just into support tickets after launch.Â
None of these require a new operating model on day one, only a decision to treat a partner as part of how the operation runs rather than as one more tool your team operates.
Where Logicbroker fits
Logicbroker works with enterprise retailers as a commerce operations partner. Dropship and marketplace programs run on one platform connected to a network of suppliers, with supplier onboarding and product onboarding built in. Because suppliers connect through the network, supplier, order, and inventory data are already shared between the retailer and Logicbroker, which removes the data and integration barriers that keep many partnerships transactional.
If you’re planning the next phase of a dropship or marketplace program, our team can walk through what a deeper partnership would look like for your operation. For a broader framework on moving commerce operations from manual coordination toward intelligent execution, see our eBook, Autonomous Commerce: The Operator’s Guide to Moving from Manual Coordination to Intelligent Execution.