For decades, the math on parcel delivery was simple. You negotiated a contract with UPS or FedEx, maybe used USPS for lightweight stuff, and called it a day. That model is breaking apart.

AlixPartners’ 2026 U.S. Consumer & Executive Home Delivery Survey, now in its 14th year, dropped a stat that would have been unthinkable five years ago: 55% of retailers now use carriers outside the traditional UPS, FedEx, and USPS group. More than a third have actively moved volume away from the incumbents. This isn’t experimentation anymore. It’s a structural shift in how goods get from warehouse to doorstep.

The question isn’t whether last-mile carrier diversification is happening. It’s whether your supply chain is set up to take advantage of it.

The Pressure That Broke the Old Model

Consumers got faster. That’s the short version. The longer version involves years of Amazon conditioning shoppers to expect two-day (or same-day) delivery at zero cost. AlixPartners found that shoppers now expect free delivery in an average of 2.7 days, down from 3.5+ days in prior survey years. For grocery and food items, that number drops to 0.9 days. Nearly a day.

Here’s the part that should worry any retailer still running a single-carrier playbook: 94% of consumers say free shipping impacts their purchase decisions, and nearly 70% say it has a “great impact.” Over 20% of demand is at risk when timing expectations aren’t met. Customers don’t write angry emails about slow shipping. They just buy from someone else.

Meanwhile, delivery costs keep climbing. 83% of retailers in the survey reported that home delivery costs rose year-over-year, and 64% said home delivery isn’t accretive to profitability compared to in-store sales. You’re spending more to deliver packages that make you less money than a walk-in customer. That equation forces you to find efficiencies wherever they exist.

For most retailers, carrier diversification is where they found them.

What Multi-Carrier Actually Looks Like in 2026

The term “alternative carrier” covers a lot of ground these days. It’s not just about swapping FedEx for some scrappy regional player. Retailers are building layered delivery networks that match the right carrier to the right shipment based on geography, speed requirements, and cost.

Regional parcel carriers are the biggest story here. OnTrac now covers roughly 70-80% of the U.S. population across 31+ states after a series of expansions. In their core service areas, they deliver an average of 1.9 days faster than the national carriers, with seven-day delivery and cost savings typically running 10-35%. That’s not a marginal improvement. For a retailer shipping thousands of parcels daily from a West Coast fulfillment center, those savings compound quickly.

Then there’s Veho, which takes a different approach entirely. Their app-based driver network has posted 99%+ on-time delivery performance with a 4.9 out of 5 customer satisfaction rating. Macy’s, Sephora, and Lululemon all use them. The results are hard to argue with: brands using Veho report 40% higher customer lifetime value and 70% fewer delivery-related refunds. When the delivery experience becomes a brand differentiator, the carrier becomes a marketing asset.

GLS US is quietly expanding from its Western U.S. stronghold into Texas and beyond, often delivering a full day faster than nationals in their lanes.

Gig and crowdsourced delivery represents the other major shift. Dollar General runs same-day delivery through Uber Eats from more than 14,000 locations. Best Buy uses the same platform across 800+ stores for electronics and appliances. Home Depot pulls from Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart simultaneously for same-day and bulky-item delivery. Old Navy, Pacsun, and Camping World have similar setups.

These aren’t pilot programs. They’re core fulfillment channels handling real volume.

Over 90% of retailers now use a carrier mix, according to AlixPartners, and roughly a third use four or more carriers. The single-carrier model is functionally dead at scale.

The Reliability Flip

Here’s something that shifted between last year’s survey and this one: reliability has overtaken price as the top carrier-selection criterion for retailers. That’s a meaningful change. For years, procurement teams optimized carrier contracts around cost per package. Now they’re optimizing around delivery consistency.

The logic makes sense when you look at the consumer data. 84% of shoppers say the delivery experience influences their future shopping decisions. A cheap carrier that misses windows or damages packages costs you the customer, not just the shipment. The math changes when you factor in customer lifetime value instead of just per-package rates.

This is also why Amazon consistently leads consumer carrier preferences for timeliness and package condition. Whatever you think about Amazon’s broader market impact, they’ve trained consumers to expect delivery precision. Every other retailer is benchmarked against that standard whether they like it or not.

FedEx has responded to this environment by edging ahead as the most-cited primary carrier among retailers in the survey, at roughly 35-38%. UPS remains competitive, but the incumbents are both dealing with the same reality: they need to justify premium pricing against regional carriers that are faster in their lanes and gig platforms that can deliver from stores in hours.

What This Means for Supply Chain Technology

Carrier diversification sounds straightforward. Use more carriers. But operationally, it’s a technology problem.

A single-carrier setup needs a single integration, one set of label formats, one tracking feed, one claims process. A four-carrier setup needs all of that multiplied by four, plus intelligent routing logic to decide which carrier gets which package based on destination, service level, package dimensions, and cost.

This is where Transportation Management Systems (TMS) and multi-carrier shipping platforms become non-negotiable. You need automated carrier selection that evaluates options in real time. You need unified tracking across carriers so your customer service team isn’t checking four different portals. You need rate-shopping that factors in actual delivered cost, not just the base rate.

AI is entering this space aggressively. AlixPartners notes that AI is a high-priority investment area for retailers focused on ETAs, routing optimization, failed-delivery reduction, and predictive tracking. When you’re routing across multiple carriers and fulfillment nodes, machine learning models that predict carrier performance by lane and time of week become a real competitive advantage.

The retailers getting this right aren’t just diversifying carriers. They’re investing in the orchestration layer that makes diversification work at scale.

How Retailers Are Managing the Cost Squeeze

Even with carrier diversification reducing per-package costs, the overall economics of home delivery remain brutal. That 64% of retailers saying home delivery isn’t profitable compared to in-store sales tells you something about the structural challenge.

Retailers are responding with a mix of tactics. 56% now require minimum order values for free shipping, and half of those have raised the threshold recently. About 22% combine paid membership programs with minimum-order requirements. There’s also a renewed push toward in-store pickup and returns as a way to avoid last-mile costs entirely.

The smartest operators are using these levers together. A customer ordering $15 worth of product might see a shipping fee or a suggestion to pick up in-store. A customer ordering $75 gets free shipping routed through the lowest-cost carrier for their ZIP code. A customer who needs something today gets same-day through a gig platform at a premium.

That level of segmentation requires both the technology stack to execute it and the carrier network to support it. Neither works without the other.

Where This Goes From Here

Some forecasts project that Amazon plus alternative carriers will surpass the combined parcel volume of UPS, FedEx, and USPS by 2027. Whether that timeline proves accurate or not, the direction is clear. The Big Three aren’t going away, but their share of the last-mile market is shrinking as retailers build more flexible delivery networks.

USPS is accelerating this shift by opening its last-mile network of 18,000+ delivery units to external bidders through a formal process that kicked off in early 2026. That adds another option to an already crowded field.

For supply chain leaders evaluating their carrier strategy, the takeaway from AlixPartners’ survey is straightforward. Last-mile carrier diversification isn’t a logistics experiment or a procurement tactic. It’s becoming the operational backbone of competitive retail fulfillment. The technology to manage it exists today. The consumer expectations demanding it aren’t going to soften. And the retailers who build these networks now will have a structural cost and service advantage that compounds over time.

The days of negotiating one carrier contract and calling it a strategy are over. They’ve been over for a while. The survey just put a number on it.

Conclusion

The 55% figure from AlixPartners represents a tipping point. When more than half of retailers have moved beyond the Big Three for last-mile delivery, we’re not talking about early adopters or edge cases. We’re talking about the new default.

The winning playbook combines regional carriers for cost and speed advantages in their lanes, gig platforms for same-day and store-based fulfillment, and nationals for coverage where alternatives don’t reach. All of it tied together by technology that makes routing decisions automatically and tracking visible to the customer regardless of which carrier has the package.

If you’re still running a single-carrier or dual-carrier strategy, the gap between your delivery economics and your competitors’ is widening every quarter.