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During Prime Days 2025, one client brand Rithum works with saw their conversion and average order value slide early. Instead of throwing more budget at weak campaigns, the team held spend, watched the data, and waited for cleaner signals. When performance improved later in the event, they pushed onward and finished strong.
An apparel brand during the same period saw similar issues. But they decided not to wait. Reliable performance signals showed a shift toward back-to-school demand. So, the team pivoted mid-event and adjusted assortments to focus on back-to-school products, introduced bundle offers, and optimized product titles and keywords. That shift resulted in a 15% increase in sales year over year vs. the previous Prime Day.
Both brands took different approaches, based on having the visibility and confidence to act on what the data was telling them. There wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but the key was data and agility.
But according to the 2026 commerce readiness index, a survey of 200 brand and retail leaders across the U.S. and U.K, many brands don’t have that level of confidence and visibility to make it work.
According to the survey data, economic instability and inflation are the top hurdles to market expansion for both retailers and brands. But close behind sit technology and data challenges, rising operational costs, shifting consumer behavior, and supply chain issues.
Some of that drag is the market. But lot of it is self-inflicted. Using the survey responses from commerce leaders, these are the three internal drags you say you feel the most . . . and what you can about them. And one external headwind you can only prepare for.
Hidden drag 1: Manual ecommerce operations that slow omnichannel growth
This drag shows up in the everyday work that still runs on spreadsheets and email, even as your sales channels and partners multiply.
According to the survey, leaders say they’re “stuck at spreadsheet speed.” Fully automated workflows are rare, with many retail and brand leaders saying that 26% to 50% of their workflows still rely on manual steps like spreadsheets and email.
In practice, this might look like retail vendor analysts pulling late-order reports into Excel, pivoting them, emailing suppliers one by one, and manually editing product descriptions before listings go live. On the brand side, manual work often involves pulling performance signals from multiple platforms, reconciling conflicting reports in spreadsheets, and chasing analysts for validation before anyone can act.
You can see the impact of that manual overload in the data. Nearly three quarters of leaders say they at least sometimes make decisions based on inaccurate or inconsistent data, and more than a third say it happens often or all the time.
53% of retailers say they act on important performance signals within 48 hours; brands are more likely to need three to five business days. Even the fastest groups say they are still acting on incomplete or inconsistent data and largely manual processes.
If you’re selling through marketplaces, dropship programs, retailer.com sites, and your own direct-to-consumer (D2C) website, this is more than an internal annoyance. Manual listing updates, inventory syncs, and routing decisions become the places where channels drift and small errors balloon across your entire network.
To turn this drag into an advantage, teams are:
- Automating onboarding of assortments, content updates, inventory synchronization, and order routing where possible.
- Consolidating product, inventory, and order data so a change to a SKU is reflected wherever you sell it.
- Replacing “hero” spreadsheets with shared rules and playbooks that run on current, accurate data.
Hidden drag 2: AI running on messy product and inventory data
This drag appears when AI is built on data that is incomplete, inconsistent, or scattered across systems.
AI is already live for many of the retailers and brands surveyed. 41% of retailers and 29% of brands use AI-based automation across functions like pricing, inventory, and marketing, and another 57% of brands and 41% of retailers say they are getting ready to implement it.
At the same time, nearly three in four leaders say AI is advancing faster than their organizations can apply it effectively.
The gap is visible:
- 49% of retailers and 62% of brands say they still struggle with too many manual processes.
- 91% of retailers and 78% of brands say poor data quality is a challenge.
The same leaders rolling out AI across pricing, inventory, and marketing are also telling us they don’t fully trust the data underneath it. When catalog attributes are inconsistent, stock numbers are unreliable, or order and return data live in different silos, AI trained on that information doesn’t fix the issues, it magnifies them.
This can show up as:
- Retail media campaigns bidding on SKUs that are already out of stock on key partners.
- Pricing models making decisions based on incomplete fees or cost data in certain channels.
- AI “optimizing” assortments based on stale sell-through and margin data.
How to make AI actually useful
Start by fixing the inputs. Clean up product data, improve inventory accuracy, and connect orders and returns back to their source channels so you know what really happened and where.
Then shorten the path from insight to action. If every AI-driven price or bid suggestion still has to be pasted into a spreadsheet and debated in a meeting, you will never see the benefit.
Apply AI where it matters most: margin pressure from fulfillment and logistics, inventory stock-outs, and wasted media on low-quality traffic. Those are natural places to focus AI, once the data is ready.
Hidden drag 3: Margin erosion across marketplaces and retail media
This drag shows up in the small gaps where money and customers slip away across channels.
Brands say the biggest hits in the past year came from fulfilment, logistics, and product costs. Retailers point first to tariffs and trade disruptions. Both groups also call out discounts, paid media inefficiency, and listing errors or inaccurate product data as other margin drains.
Retailers most often lose shoppers before checkout, especially when ads do not match the product experience or when payment fails. Brands are more likely to have problems after the sale, in customer care and returns or refunds.
At the same time, 91% of retailers and 84% of brands say they have changed their marketing channel mix in the last year, often in response to shifting consumer behavior and strategy.
Some examples where customers and profit are lost in operations:
- Broken links or mismatched product pages that cause pre-checkout drop-off.
- Ads driving to SKUs that are out of stock or unprofitable to ship once fees and costs are counted.
- Returns and service policies that vary by channel, leaving some experiences noticeably worse.
The fix is to connect performance metrics with operational and margin data to see where the problems really come from. Are you losing money because of traffic quality, or because of content, availability, or fulfillment issues that could be fixed centrally and rolled out across channels?
The drag you can’t fix: External volatility and ecommerce expansion
This force comes from outside your walls, but it still shapes how fast you can grow and where.
When retail and brand leaders rank their top hurdles to expanding into new markets, economic instability and inflation come first for both. Close behind are technology and data challenges, rising operational costs, shifting consumer behavior, supply chain issues, regulatory complexity, and tariff or trade uncertainty.
Tariffs in particular stand out. 46% of retailers and 60% of brands say they are at least somewhat concerned that tariff and trade shifts will disrupt their sourcing strategies. More than 60% of both groups say they are re-evaluating sourcing relationships to prepare, while many are also cutting business costs and investing in supply chain resilience.
You cannot control that volatility. However, you can decide how much internal drag you stack on top of it. Focus on what you can change by building stronger operations, reducing technology barriers, and creating more flexible, integrated customer experiences so you can pivot channels, partners, and assortments when conditions change.
For a deeper look at the data behind these drags and more benchmarks you can use in your own planning, download the full 2026 commerce readiness index report.
