Global shipping disruptions are putting direct pressure on e-commerce businesses in ways that go well beyond missed delivery windows. Slowing logistics routes and disrupted trade corridors have made international shipping less predictable and more expensive. Major carriers have warned merchants about extended transit times, suspended services, and temporary halts across certain routes, sending shockwaves through supply chains and leaving companies scrambling to adapt.
The cost pressure compounds fast. Carriers dealing with oil price volatility are passing the burden onto merchants in the form of fuel surcharges and emergency fees. When it all adds up, the cost of getting a product to a customer keeps rising while delivery performance is becoming harder to predict. This creates a difficult gap between customer expectations and reality. ShipStation’s research found that 59% of North American consumers expect two-day delivery, while only 40% of retailers can meet that mark.
If you’re feeling this pressure across sourcing, pricing, and fulfillment all at once, that’s not a coincidence. These challenges are connected. The merchants navigating this best are the ones who have stopped treating them as separate problems and are instead optimizing their entire systems.
Build Resilience Across Your Whole Operation
The first thing to know is that volatility doesn’t stay in its lane. Shipping disruptions affect your pricing decisions, sourcing strategies, inventory planning, and eventually your customers. Treating these as isolated issues is how manageable disruptions turn into full-blown crises.
Businesses that hold up best don’t wait for the pressure to ease. They build flexibility into their operations before they need it, so when conditions shift, the response is quick and controlled rather than reactive and expensive.
Know What Things Actually Cost
Start with your numbers. Calculate the true landed cost of each product — sourcing, duties, shipping fees, and fuel surcharges together — then build enough room into your pricing model to absorb movement without a complete re-pricing every time conditions change. Know which products can support a price adjustment, which customer segments are most sensitive to it, and where your margins are already too thin to take another hit.
The goal isn't to land on a perfect price, but to build a pricing setup that doesn't require a crisis to change. If your cost structure shifts, your prices need to be able to follow without a complete overhaul of how you go to market.
Diversify Your Carrier Mix
From working with our customers, we know that relying on a single carrier is one of the fastest ways to turn a disruption into a crisis. When events like weather slow down or suspend service on a route, you need alternatives that are already set up and ready to go rather than scrambling to evaluate options after orders have already been affected.
A multi-carrier strategy gives you room to compare rates, service levels, and delivery estimates in real time. Businesses with alternatives in place can pivot quickly without having to rebuild their workflow from scratch. That kind of agility becomes a meaningful competitive advantage when trade conditions shift suddenly.
Get Inventory Visibility Right First
Before rethinking your sourcing, get a clear picture of inventory you already have and where it is. Stock sitting in the wrong location, or delayed in a disrupted trade corridor, frustrates customers and leads to canceled orders. In a volatile environment, smarter forecasting and better inventory placement aren’t just efficiency improvements — they’re risk management strategies.
Next, take a hard look at your sourcing. The past year's volatility has already pushed many merchants to think more carefully about supplier concentration and diversifying sourcing across regions to avoid risk. Companies that proactively responded to tariffs by creating backup sourcing for critical products are finding their supplies are already secure despite trade disruptions. To do this, try having one domestic supplier for critical products with backup suppliers in other regions.
Communicate Before Customers Have to Ask
Active customer communication often gets treated as a reactive measure. Flip that around. Delays may be outside of your control, but how they’re communicated is not. Acknowledging the gap between what customers want and what is possible during disruptions matters. Review open orders shipping through affected areas, and add clear updates to order confirmations before customers are left wondering where their package is. Proactively updating customers before they have to reach out signals that your business is on top of it and helps maintain trust during volatile periods.
Moving Forward
The current trade environment isn’t going to simplify overnight. The full impact of ongoing disruptions may not be measurable for months, but waiting for perfect clarity isn’t a strategy you can afford.
The businesses that will perform best will be the ones who build flexible operations that adapt quickly with pricing adjustments, clear customer communications, diversified carriers, and inventory visibility. Resilience isn’t about predicting outcomes. It’s about building a business that can absorb change without breaking.
Travis Rimel is Chief Product Officer at ShipStation.
This article originally appeared in the May/June, 2026 issue of PARCEL.
