The Last Ten Metres: What the 2026 Shippit State of Shipping Report Means for Your Business
The gap between when you say the parcel will arrive and when it actually does is still the biggest unsolved loyalty problem in Australian retail. Dave Bauer and Rob Hango-Zada put numbers on it.
This episode discusses Shippit’s State of Shipping Report 2026. Download your copy here.
How Amart Furniture Is Thinking About the Last Ten Metres
Amart Furniture is one of Australia’s largest furniture retailers: 65 stores, a growing ecommerce operation, an online exclusive range fulfilled through Shippit, and the 2025 Canstar Best Customer Service Award. David Bauer is GM Customer, and before Amart he spent more than a decade at Super Retail Group, which is also where he and Nathan first worked together. He joined us for this one alongside Rob Hango-Zada, who co-founded Shippit in 2014 and has now published the State of Shipping Report three years running.
The story Dave tells about the last ten metres is one of those things that sticks. You can have the best store team in the business, the cleanest website, the strongest Trustpilot reviews. Then a dirty truck reverses down the driveway, takes out the mailbox, and the drivers put muddy boots on the new carpet. Everything that came before it, the research, the purchase, the weeks of anticipation, gets undone in ten metres. The customer doesn’t distinguish between the retailer and the carrier. Whatever happens at the door, that’s Amart.
Rob called this year’s report the biggest yet, most consumers surveyed, most deliveries analysed, most carriers benchmarked. The conversation is practical and occasionally very funny. Dave never dropped a single f-bomb despite setting it up. The rattle surcharge is real.
“Every week in our leadership meeting we have a graph with how we’re doing on broken promises.”
David Bauer, GM Customer, Amart Furniture
The Last Ten Metres Is Where the Brand Lives
What makes Amart’s approach worth paying attention to is the language as much as the measurement. The weekly leadership review doesn’t track “orders outstanding” or “SLA breaches.” It tracks broken promises. A broken promise is when a customer was told their furniture would arrive in a certain window and it didn’t go on the truck in time. When that happens, someone at Amart gets on the phone. The call is uncomfortable by design, and that discomfort is exactly the point.
Dave is honest about where the hard part actually sits. Once the couch is in the truck, they’re reasonably good. The challenge is everything upstream: a customer in Sydney wants a red lounge that’s sitting in Brisbane, the stock has to transit before the courier clock even starts. The solution is partly systems and partly incentives. Store P&Ls at Amart now include online transactions, so store teams are motivated to fulfil online orders with the same urgency as a walk-in customer rather than treating them as someone else’s problem.
If your business doesn’t track broken promises as a weekly metric, you’re probably measuring the wrong things. What would yours look like?
Only 7% of Retailers Offer an Accurate Delivery Estimate at Checkout
Four in five retailers are anticipating growth in 2026, despite low consumer confidence, high interest rates and everything else going on in the world. Rob led with that number as the finding that surprised him most, and we’d agree it’s an eye-opener given the mood you hear at most industry events right now.
The uncomfortable part comes from the next stat. Only 7% of Australian retailers currently offer an accurate delivery estimate at checkout. The average promise is 5.2 business days. The actual carrier delivery time, once an order is in the network, is 2.2 days. The problem isn’t the carriers. Most retailers don’t know where an item is coming from until after a purchase is made, so they can’t make a precise promise at checkout. They’re not lying. They’re guessing, and they’re guessing conservatively because that’s all they can do.
The benchmark shifting underneath all of this is the Amazon-trained consumer. Rob’s line lands the same way every year because it keeps being true: your last best experience is your new expectation. Nathan’s daughter Grace, who is nine, wanted a Michael Jackson record on a Sunday night. Bondo Records could do it in five to ten days. Amazon Prime could do it by tomorrow for five dollars more. Grace chose tomorrow, and then asked whether it would arrive before school. That is the customer every retailer is now competing against, whether they’re selling furniture or vinyl.
“Your last best experience is your new expectation.”
Rob Hango-Zada, Co-Founder and CEO, Shippit
The Rattle Surcharge, Delivery Costs and Where This Is All Heading
Standard delivery now costs $11.30 on average in Australia, up a dollar on last year, with fuel surcharges, labour, real estate and natural disasters all pushing costs higher. Rob’s view is that this isn’t a phase to get through. It’s the operating environment now, and probably for a while.
One carrier charges a rattle surcharge for boxes containing glass, which Rob describes as “shaping freight”: if certain product types are costly to move through your network, you either price them accordingly or you decline the volume. The stranger-sounding practices start to make sense when you understand the margin pressure carriers are operating under.
The more structural shift is the compression of delivery speeds. Same-day delivery, now carrying real volume, is closing in on the cost of express. Rob’s read is that the three-tier model of standard, express and same-day will eventually flatten into one method at one price point, with a Temu-style economy tier sitting beneath it for customers who genuinely don’t mind waiting. For Dave, the answer is moving in the opposite direction on premium: a white-glove delivery tier for Amart’s signature range, with the furniture brought into the room, set up, packaging taken away. It won’t make money on the service cost alone. The return is in loyalty and in protecting the customer relationship that everything else in the business has been built to earn.
When delivery cost is heading in one direction and customer expectations are heading in the other, what’s your plan that isn’t just absorbing the gap?
The Takeaway
The retailers making ground in 2026 are doing what Adore Beauty CEO Sarah Mullen called the unglamorous work in her foreword to the report: cleaner data, better returns, fulfilment that holds when peak hits. None of it makes for a good case study headline. All of it compounds into the kind of loyalty that a brand promise alone can’t deliver.
If you only do one thing after this episode, get an accurate delivery estimate live at your checkout. You’ll be in the 7% that does. And if you don’t have a broken promises graph in your weekly leadership meeting, that’s probably the more important one to start with first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the delivery promise gap in the 2026 Shippit State of Shipping Report? The promise gap is the difference between the average delivery estimate retailers give at checkout (5.2 business days) and the average actual carrier delivery time once an order enters the network (2.2 days). Most retailers can’t close this gap because they don’t know which location an item will be fulfilled from until after the purchase is made.
Why do only 7% of Australian retailers offer an accurate delivery estimate at checkout? Providing an accurate estimate requires knowing in real time where inventory is held and how long it will take to move from that location into the carrier network. Most retailers only know where an order will be fulfilled from after the sale, which makes a precise checkout promise structurally impossible without investment in orchestration technology or order management systems.
What is a “broken promise” in retail delivery, and why does it matter? A broken promise is when a retailer commits to a delivery window at the point of sale and then misses it. Amart tracks this as a top-line leadership KPI reviewed every week, because missing a delivery promise is the moment a customer decides whether to remain loyal or try a competitor. The language matters too: calling it a broken promise rather than an SLA breach connects the metric to the customer relationship.
Are free returns still standard in Australian ecommerce? No. The 2026 Shippit report shows only one in ten Australian retailers now offers free returns, down from one in two in 2018. Most have moved to “easy returns” models with low-friction processes and self-serve return labels, often replacing full refunds with store credit at 110% of order value to keep the revenue inside the brand.
Based on Episode #633 of the Add To Cart podcast, a Shippit Exclusive episode with David Bauer, GM Customer at Amart Furniture, and Rob Hango-Zada, Co-Founder and CEO of Shippit. Download the 2026 State of Shipping Report here. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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