The Winners' Playbook: What Top-Performing Merchants Are Doing Differently in 2026
Every earnings season tells the same story with new numbers: the gap between retail's top performers and everyone else keeps widening. What's striking, when you line up what the winners are actually doing, is how little of it happens before the buy button. The strategies compounding into market share in 2026 are concentrated in the part of the business most brands still treat as plumbing — delivery, fulfillment, returns, and the operational layer underneath them.
We went looking for the verifiable moves — announced programs, published numbers, named brands — rather than conference-keynote generalities. Six strategies come up again and again.
1. They sell speed and certainty as a product
The biggest players have stopped treating delivery as a cost line and started shipping it as a feature. Amazon's 30-minute delivery service, Amazon Now, already operates in Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Seattle, with plans to reach dozens more cities by the end of 2026, per Axios [1]. Walmart runs its own 30-minute service in 33 markets, powered by its nationwide store network [2]. Target is scaling "Last Mile Delivery Direct" through Shipt to more than 100 stores across 50 markets by the end of 2026 — and eMarketer notes the move cuts its cost to serve by roughly $2.50 per package versus national parcel carriers [3].
Why the arms race? Because the delivery experience prices the product. Bringg's November 2025 study of 1,000 US online shoppers found 65% of regular shoppers — and 81% of high-frequency "power shoppers" — say a positive delivery experience convinced them to buy again even at a higher price than competitors, and 60% cite on-time guarantees as a key factor in completing checkout at all [4]. Meanwhile expectations keep compressing: AlixPartners' 2026 Home Delivery Survey found consumers now expect free delivery to arrive in 2.7 days on average, down from over 3.5 days in earlier editions [5].
The winners' insight isn't "be fast everywhere." It's that a credible, differentiated promise — 30 minutes where it's possible, a reliable two days where it's not — converts and retains, while a vague one quietly leaks revenue at checkout.
2. They turned the store estate into a fulfillment network
The clearest structural advantage incumbent retailers hold over pure-play eCommerce is square footage near customers — and top performers have operationalized it. Dick's Sporting Goods now ships around 80% of its online orders from the shelves of its roughly 900 stores, up from 70% in 2021, per Retail Brew [6]. That's not a pilot; that's the network.
Customers are meeting them halfway. US click-and-collect sales are projected to reach $177.9 billion in 2026 — about 11.6% of all US eCommerce — according to eMarketer [7]. Pickup, ship-from-store, and store-based same-day delivery all draw on the same underlying capability: knowing, in real time, what inventory is where, and being able to route an order to the location best placed to serve it.
That capability is the tell. The brands winning here didn't just add a "pickup" button — they invested in inventory accuracy and order routing so every store could behave like a small, close-to-the-customer warehouse.
3. They redesigned returns as policy plus experience
Returns stopped being a back-office problem the moment they hit the P&L at scale: US retailers were projected to take back $849.9 billion of merchandise in 2025 — a 15.8% return rate overall, and 19.3% of online sales — per the NRF and Happy Returns' 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report [8]. The same report found 82% of consumers say free returns matter when shopping online, and 9% of all returns are fraudulent [8].
Squeezed between those two numbers, top merchants have gotten surgical rather than generous-or-brutal. Zara charges a fee for courier returns in major markets while keeping in-store returns free; H&M charges non-members for mail returns in the UK; ASOS applies a returns fee to customers whose return behaviour makes free returns "unsustainable" — while leaving the mainstream experience untouched [9]. The pattern: price the expensive channel, keep the cheap one (the store, the drop-off point) free and frictionless, and treat serial-returner economics separately from loyal-customer economics.
Notice this strategy only works if you have differentiated return channels and the rules engine to steer between them. Policy sophistication without operational sophistication is just fine print.
4. They re-localized cross-border — fast
When the US ended the de minimis exemption in 2025, the most instructive response came from the merchants with the most to lose. Temu halted shipping goods directly from Chinese warehouses to US consumers in May 2025 and moved to fulfilling US orders through locally based sellers and domestic inventory, per Supply Chain Dive [10] — a wholesale supply-chain reversal that Marketplace Pulse has documented as a shift of inventory, pricing, and logistics into local markets [11]. With the EU now moving to remove its own €150 duty-free threshold, the same playbook is being run again in Europe.
The lesson generalizes beyond marketplaces: top performers treat trade policy as an operations input, not a quarterly surprise. They re-plan lanes, restructure where inventory sits, and re-price landed costs while slower competitors are still reading the regulation.
5. They engineer peak instead of enduring it
The 2026 peak calendar is now essentially published. UPS released its holiday demand surcharge schedule on August 26 — with per-package demand fees up roughly 22–25% year over year, and a peak-of-peak mechanism that applies a $2.65 surcharge to every Ground Residential package in any week volume hits 175% of baseline, per Supply Chain Dive [12]. FedEx published its calendar back on July 22, with peak Ground Residential fees up 23% year over year [13].
Carriers, in other words, run peak as an engineering problem with published parameters. The retailers that win Q4 do the same — and they do it now, in September: diversifying carrier mix before capacity caps bind, computing honest cut-off dates per lane rather than guessing one site-wide banner, and modeling surcharge exposure into promotion planning (that 175% trigger makes a single flash sale capable of repricing an entire week of parcels). The deadline crowd they're preparing for keeps growing — NRF projected a record 158.9 million Super Saturday shoppers last year, five days before Christmas [14].
6. They are making themselves legible to AI shoppers
The newest line in the playbook is the least visible in stores. Traffic to US retail sites from generative AI sources grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, per Adobe Analytics — and by March 2026, AI-referred visitors were converting 42% better than the site average, a full reversal from a year earlier [15][16]. Since Adobe began tracking in October 2024, AI-referred retail traffic is up more than 1,300% [16].
Top merchants are responding on two fronts: making product, pricing, delivery-promise and returns data machine-readable so AI assistants can represent them accurately, and preparing their commerce and logistics APIs for a world where the "shopper" completing checkout may be an agent acting for a human. Adobe's own analysis warns that most retail sites still lag on AI-search visibility [16] — which is precisely why the leaders are moving early.
The pattern behind the plays
Read the six together and a common thread appears: none of them is a front-end tactic. Speed as a product, stores as a network, surgical returns, re-localized trade lanes, engineered peaks, agent-readiness — every one is a post-checkout operations capability wearing a customer-experience costume. The winners decided the journey from checkout to doorstep (and back) is a product, gave it an owner, and built the operational layer to run it.
The honest objection from most mid-size and enterprise brands is equally consistent: we don't have Amazon's capex or Walmart's store count. True — but the capabilities underneath these strategies (multi-carrier orchestration, distributed order routing, rules-driven returns, computed delivery promises, agent-ready APIs) no longer require building them in-house. That's the layer Carriyo exists to provide — and it's exactly what we'll unpack on Friday: how the winners' playbook runs on a platform, not a balance sheet.
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Sources
1. Axios — "Amazon escalates retail speed war with 30-minute delivery" (May 12, 2026): https://www.axios.com/2026/05/12/amazon-delivery-speed-war-walmart-target 2. Retail Dive — "Will high-speed grocery delivery allow Amazon and Walmart to close the gap on convenience?" (2026): https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-walmart-30-minute-delivery-grocery-ecommerce/822779/ 3. eMarketer — "Target leans on Shipt to speed deliveries and cut costs" (2026): https://www.emarketer.com/content/target-leans-on-shipt-speed-deliveries-cut-costs 4. Bringg — study of 1,000 US online shoppers (November 2025); loyalty/premium and checkout-guarantee findings (as cited in our 2026-08-26 piece, previously fact-checked) 5. AlixPartners — 2026 Home Delivery Survey (fielded April–May 2026); 2.7-day free-delivery expectation (previously fact-checked, 2026-08-26 piece) 6. Retail Brew — "How Dick's fulfills 80% of online orders from its stores' shelves" (January 20, 2026): https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2026/01/20/how-dick-s-fulfills-80-of-online-orders-from-its-stores-shelves 7. eMarketer — "US Click-and-Collect Sales, 2019–2026" (current forecast: $177.9B, +15.3% YoY, 11.6% of US eCommerce in 2026): https://www.emarketer.com/chart/261260/us-click-and-collect-sales-2019-2026-billions-change-of-retail-ecommerce-sales 8. NRF & Happy Returns — 2025 Retail Returns Landscape (October 2025): https://nrf.com/research/2025-retail-returns-landscape 9. City AM — "How retailers like ASOS, H&M and Zara are fighting back against 'serial' returns" (ASOS fair-use fee): https://www.cityam.com/how-retailers-like-asos-hm-and-zara-are-fighting-back-against-serial-returns/ ; Retail Gazette — "H&M increases online return fees for UK customers" (January 2025; £1.99 rising to £2.95 from Feb 3, 2025, in-store free): https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2025/01/hm-return-fees/ ; Retail Dive — "Zara now charges for some returns. Will other retailers follow?" (courier-return fee, in-store free): https://www.retaildive.com/news/zara-now-charges-for-some-returns-will-other-retailers-follow/624906/ ; eMarketer — "Why Zara charging for online returns may backfire": https://www.emarketer.com/content/why-zara-charging-online-returns-may-backfire 10. Supply Chain Dive — "Temu pursues 'local fulfillment' to dodge tariffs" (2025): https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/temu-walks-back-price-increases/747126/ 11. Marketplace Pulse — "The Great Supply Chain Reversal": https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-great-supply-chain-reversal 12. Supply Chain Dive — "UPS preps higher holiday surcharges for 2026" (August 2026): https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/ups-preps-higher-holiday-surcharges-for-2026/828936/ ; UPS demand surcharge schedule (updated Aug 26, 2026): https://assets.ups.com/adobe/assets/urn:aaid:aem:2c542692-de10-4fa3-b507-3b4f181e0953/original/as/demand-surcharges-us-en.pdf 13. Supply Chain Dive — FedEx 2026 peak surcharge announcement (July 22, 2026; previously fact-checked, 2026-08-26 piece) 14. NRF / Prosper Insights & Analytics — record 158.9M projected Super Saturday 2025 shoppers (previously fact-checked, 2026-08-26 piece) 15. TechCrunch — "AI traffic to US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it's boosting their revenue too" (April 16, 2026): https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/ai-traffic-to-us-retailers-rose-393-in-q1-and-its-boosting-their-revenue-too/ 16. Adobe Digital Insights / Adobe Analytics data as reported by Digital Commerce 360 — "Adobe: AI-referred traffic to retail sites doubles in a year" (June 17, 2026; includes the 1,324% growth since Oct 2024 and Adobe's AI-search-visibility findings): https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/06/17/adobe-ai-referred-traffic-to-retail-sites-doubles-in-a-year/