When Dick’s Sporting Goods launched their new dropship program in 2026, they said bringing a new brand, category, or product online used to take months. Since then, their supplier onboarding has come down from a 70 day average to just under 17 days per supplier, with the average new supplier falling even lower. Â
Most enterprise retailers will recognize the months-long version of that story, and few have a platform relaunch on the calendar to fix it. For them, the gap between what merchandising wants to sell and what the business can actually stand up is set by one thing: how much work the operations team can absorb.
Demand is not what’s holding retailers back
U.S. ecommerce sales reached $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, up 12.2% from a year earlier and close to twice the growth rate of total retail, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Online now accounts for 17.1% of all retail sales.
Retail leaders expect that momentum to hold. In Deloitte’s 2026 Retail Industry Global Outlook, 96% of the 330 executives surveyed expect revenue growth and 81% expect operating margins to expand. At the same time, 95% expect trade policy to push their costs higher. Deloitte notes that the margin optimism rests on cost savings, efficiency programs, and productivity gains.
That is a lot of weight to put on the people running commerce operations. Revenue can grow and margins can widen while costs rise only if each person behind the operation handles more volume this year than last.
Every new supplier is new operational work
Assortment growth increasingly runs through suppliers whose inventory the retailer never owns. Target expects its curated marketplace to grow from about $1 billion in third-party sales in 2024 to more than $5 billion by 2030. Best Buy, Lowe’s, Macy’s, and Ulta have all turned to marketplace models to widen their digital shelves without taking on inventory risk.
The model moves inventory off the balance sheet, but every supplier who joins a drop ship or marketplace program brings recurring work that lands somewhere inside the retailer.
It starts with onboarding: connecting the supplier by EDI, API, or portal, testing documents, and confirming compliance, then repeating parts of that whenever the supplier changes systems. Every new SKU then goes through product onboarding, with attributes, images, and identifiers mapped to the retailer’s catalog standard, and every catalog refresh reopens that work.
Once the supplier is live, the work becomes daily. Inventory feeds have to arrive on time and reflect real stock at each warehouse to ensure optimal fullfilment. Every order needs an acknowledgment, a ship date, and a tracking number. Late shipments, cancellations, and backorders get worked as they happen, and every billing cycle brings invoices to match and chargebacks to apply or dispute.
None of this appears in the assortment plan, and all of it grows with supplier and SKU count.
What the ceiling looks like in practice
Walmart publishes the standards it holds drop ship vendors to, and they show how much monitoring a single program involves. Suppliers must send at least one full inventory feed per warehouse each business day, acknowledge every order line within four business hours, ship 99% of orders on time, and keep backorders at or below 0.1%. Late shipments beyond a 1% allowance carry a $5 chargeback per purchase order.
Those are obligations on the supplier, and someone on the retailer side has to verify each one. A program with 300 suppliers produces at least 300 inventory feeds to check every business day before a single order ships, followed by every acknowledgment, tracking update, and exception that comes after.
In most programs, the ceiling first appears as a supplier onboarding queue where suppliers approved by merchandising wait weeks to go live. Then it shows up as slipping product data quality, because the people setting up items are also chasing late shipments. Eventually it shows up in planning, when expansion gets scoped to what the team can absorb instead of what customers want to buy.
The usual fixes move the ceiling instead of removing it
Hiring works for a while. Each new hire adds roughly the capacity that the next group of suppliers consumes, so cost per supplier stays flat and operations headcount climbs on the same line as GMV. That is the opposite of the productivity gain retailers are counting on for margin.
Adding point soluitions helps with individual tasks, but the tools inherit whatever data they sit on top of. BCG’s February 2026 analysis found that most retailers are held back by fragmented, low-quality data after years of underinvestment, and 44% of executives in Deloitte’s survey say legacy systems are slowing innovation.
The other common response is handing the work to an outside provider, which comes with its own tradeoffs. We’ll look at that choice in the next post in this series.
Why the ceiling matters more in 2026
AI shopping agents are raising the standard for the work operations teams do. According to the Visa and PYMNTS 2026 Global Digital Shopping Index, just 15% of merchants have the structured data AI agents need to understand their products, pricing, and policies. Complete product data and current inventory are what determine whether an agent recommends a retailer at all, and both are outputs of the operations team. We covered what that data needs to look like in preparing product data for AI shopping agents.
The organizational side is shifting too. In a Gartner survey of 509 supply chain leaders, 55% said they expect agentic AI to reduce the need for entry-level hires, and respondents named AI-driven changes in ways of working as the single biggest force reshaping supply chain strategy over the next two years. BCG estimates that retailers furthest along could raise productivity by more than 30% and grow without adding headcount. Retailers that break the link between growth and headcount will set the pace for everyone else.
Where to start: measure your own ceiling
Three numbers will tell you how close your operation is to its limit:
- Operations headcount against GMV over the last eight quarters. If the two lines move together, growth is being bought with people.
- Days from supplier approval to first sellable SKU. This is the clearest single measure of onboarding capacity.
- The share of orders a person has to touch. A rising exception rate means the team is spending its time on repair instead of growth.
If those numbers are climbing alongside revenue, the constraint on your next stage of growth is already visible. The next step is knowing where your operation sits today and what it takes to move past manual coordination. Our eBook, Autonomous Commerce: The Operator’s Guide to Moving from Manual Coordination to Intelligent Execution, lays out a five-level maturity curve for commerce operations and a practical framework for climbing it, so you can benchmark your team and plan the path from there.