Not every trend deserves the hype, and not every “best practice” holds up under scrutiny. That tension was on full display during ShipStation’s Innovation Delivered, where leaders in ecommerce and fulfillment discussed all things AI, automation, and delivery.

Across multiple sessions, brand founders, analysts, practitioners, and thought leaders shared their unfiltered takes on some of this year’s most controversial and widely debated topics in ecommerce and delivery.

Here’s what the speakers and panelists said when the myths hit the floor.

Myth 1: Free shipping has ruined ecommerce margins

Amazon conditioned shoppers to expect free, fast shipping on everything, and every other brand felt compelled to follow. The story goes that once free shipping became table stakes, it quietly destroyed profit across the industry, and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

What the room said:

The panel didn’t buy it.

Jason Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Groupe, argued during the Ecommerce Mythbusters: Hype vs. Reality session that the premise is simply wrong.

“I absolutely don’t think free shipping has ruined margins. The two biggest retailers in the United States, Walmart and Amazon, provide quite a bit of free shipping with very healthy margins,” said Goldberg. “There are about 42 different ways to provide free shipping, and they have wildly different costs.”

The problem, in his view, isn’t the offer itself. It’s the terms behind it.

Matt Hertz, Founder and CEO of Third Person, located the real issue in operations, not the offer.

“Brands panicked, and many of them matched it without the operational infrastructure and density to actually absorb the high cost that free shipping entails,” said Hertz.

The brands that make free shipping work aren’t absorbing the cost blindly; they built their way out of it.

Automating carrier and rate selection can cut costs by anywhere from a few cents to several dollars per shipment. Those savings compound into the kind of margin that makes a free or flat shipping offer sustainable.

The deeper point underneath both takes is that delivery is a value center, not just a cost line. When you cut logistics spend without accounting for what it protects—reliability, repeat purchases, and relationships—you often churn the very customers you tried to serve cheaply.

The reality:

Free shipping didn’t kill margins. Unstructured free shipping did. The brands in trouble are the ones that matched Amazon’s promise without Amazon’s infrastructure, or that never did the math on what it actually costs them. Before you blame shipping costs, look at your marketing spend and the terms of your offer.

Myth 2: Faster shipping always wins

According to popular belief, speed is the ultimate competitive lever. A brand offering two-day delivery beats three-day delivery. So, brands race toward faster delivery, thinking the fastest option wins the customer.

What the room said:

There’s a line between what shoppers rationally need and what they instinctively want.

“Not every purchase requires equal speed,” said Goldberg. “We don’t need 30-minute delivery for every single purchase.”

Fast delivery still matters. Over half of consumers now expect a standard order to arrive within two days (ShipStation’s Ecommerce Delivery Benchmark Report 2026). Speed has become a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. Actually, reliability is a bigger driver of customer satisfaction.

“It’s one thing to offer one-to-two-day shipping, but if you consistently miss that more than 5% of the time, you burn trust,” said Josh Steinitz, Chief Strategy Officer at ShipStation Global. “You can see that in reduced downstream purchase behavior and share of wallet.”

Steinitz noted that the demand for speed varies sharply by product. Baby formula is a “need it now” purchase, while a T-shirt or flat-screen TV can usually wait a couple of days. Being fast but unpredictable just creates faster disappointment, and consistently hitting the promise you set matters more than shaving a day off.

The reality:

Consistency is more important than speed. A delivery window you actually hit beats a faster one you miss. Rather than chasing the fastest option across your entire catalog, match delivery speed to how much the customer actually values it for that specific product. More importantly, protect the trust that comes from hitting the promise you’ve made.

Myth 3: The cheapest carrier is the cheapest choice

Many brands see shipping as a commodity, so they turn to the carrier with the lowest rate. The lowest rate per parcel equals the lowest total cost.

What the room said:

Mohammed Baloch, General Manager at GlobalPost, warned during the Simplify Multi-Location Shipping and Carrier Management session that chasing the cheapest rate on every lane creates a “Frankenstein carrier portfolio.”

“Brands will have a carrier for local deliveries, a carrier for international, and a carrier for overnight. But you’re spread so thin in terms of your volume that you’re not getting great economics on your rates,” said Baloch.

In truth, “cheapest” isn’t a fixed property of a carrier. Rates change shipment by shipment based on destination, weight, dimensions, and speed. The most successful brands automatically compare carriers as each label is created, and let the best option for that specific package win.

The value of a carrier base is in its options, not just its rates.

“Having diversity in your carrier base helps. If you have options and competition within your carrier base, you have the potential to move volume to other carriers when your primary carrier raises rates,” said Rick Watson, Founder of Watson Weekly, during the Skiver vs. Watson Salsa Showdown session.

Chasing the cheapest rate also ignores the customer experience angle. When a delivery goes wrong, customers blame the brand, not the carrier. A cheap carrier that compromises reliability isn’t actually cheap once you factor in lost repeat purchases.

Aaron Rubin, Founder & CEO of ShipHero, put the cost trend in perspective during the Ecommerce Mythbusters: Hype vs. Reality session.

“Warehouse cost-to-serve has basically held at the same level as four years ago, whereas shipping has been going up 5.9%—but really more like 8%—per year.”

With parcel costs climbing that fast, he noted brands have gotten more sophisticated about leveraging multiple warehouse locations to manage the real cost, rather than just hunting for a cheaper label.

The reality:

The cheapest per-parcel rate can quietly cost you more. Fragmenting your volume across a patchwork of cheap carriers weakens your negotiating leverage and your reliability. A smaller set of carriers where you concentrate volume, while keeping enough diversity with multiple carriers to have options when rates move, usually beats chasing the lowest sticker price on every lane.

Myth 4: More robots always mean lower costs

Warehouse robotics is often held up as the path to Amazon-level efficiency. Add robots, cut labor, lower your cost-to-serve. If it works for the giants, it should work for everyone.

What the room said:

Those who have seen the reality up close have a different take.

“I’ve been inside hundreds and hundreds of warehouses over the last 15 years, and increasingly more of them have automation—specifically robotics. And at a lot of those warehouses, the robots are sitting idle on the side, collecting dust,” said Hertz.

He drew a sharp line between the demo and the day-to-day.

“Lab performance and real-world performance are very different things. Once you start dealing with oddly shaped items, liquids, replacement parts—your results may vary.”

For most mid-sized operators, the upfront cost is hard to justify without the order volume to spread it across. The smartest spend has shifted away from hardware.

“Increasingly, I think the best next dollar in cost avoidance is these data-driven efficiency improvements—inventory planning, labor planning, fulfillment center layout, and bundling—rather than moving atoms around,” said Goldberg.

For more brands, the automation with the highest ROI isn’t physical; it’s decision automation. You don’t need a warehouse full of robotics to grow your order volume without growing your headcount.

Automation rules that handle carrier selection, address validation, real-time rate shopping, and order routing let lean teams absorb volume spikes that would otherwise require a hiring spree. The point isn’t to remove people; it’s to turn best practices into default behavior, so teams stop deciding the same things order after order.

The reality:

Robots deliver Amazon-scale economics for Amazon-scale operations, but for most brands, the upfront capital rarely pays off. Fix your data and your process first, automate repetitive decisions second, and treat heavy capital investment in hardware as a last step, not a first.

Myth 5: AI is just hype that won’t change how people shop

AI is the buzzword of the moment, but many assume shopping behavior won’t really change. People will keep going to Amazon and Google the way they always have.

What the room said:

People are already shopping differently.

“I do a lot of shopping using ChatGPT or Claude. I just tell them: this is what I want, find me the best one that has it in stock at the best price. Now it’s price-shopping across 50 places. None of which are paying for ads,” said Rubin.

He’s not an outlier. Nearly 80% of consumers used a generative AI assistant in the past year, and 28% have already used chat-based AI for shopping tasks (ShipStation’s Ecommerce Delivery Benchmark Report 2026).

The effect, as Rubin argued, favors smaller brands.

“It’s a huge net positive for smaller retailers with a differentiated product. Now I can find them without them paying the Google tax,” said Rubin.

Goldberg went further on how deep the change runs.

“One of the ramifications of the emergence of agentic commerce is that all those other attributes—the ones we used to make on autopilot based on subconscious emotional triggers—become more accessible and more important,” said Goldberg. “When you outsource the decision to AI, you can do much more thorough due diligence and bring in a lot more attributes. AI fundamentally changes every touchpoint, every purchase decision, and the role brand plays.”

The honest counterweight came from Hertz.

“I’m not convinced that the ease of discovering products via the leading AI models today—GPT, Claude, and others—is necessarily going to lead to a meaningful uptick in ecommerce as a share of overall retail,” said Hertz. “Ecommerce has been growing consistently in the high single digits—excluding the COVID years—and it seems like it’ll continue at that rate. But I’m not sure AI will accelerate that further.”

Where this lands for operators is less about the flashy storefront and more about the quiet decisions behind every shipment—rate shopping, dynamic carrier selection, routing from the closest location, and predicting delays before they generate “where is my order” tickets.

The reality:

AI isn’t replacing every shopping channel, but it’s already changing how discovery and buying decisions happen, often steering shoppers toward differentiated brands and away from ad-driven aggregators. Whether or not it grows the total ecommerce pie, it’s redistributing who gets found. AI rewards substance. Brands that invest in reputation, reviews, and rich product data are the ones AI will surface.

The takeaway across all five myths

Across all five myths, speakers and panelists agreed that simple, absolute rules don’t hold up when tested against real operational data.

What actually wins is knowing your own numbers: your true cost-to-serve, delivery reliability, carrier leverage, data quality, and where your brand actually competes. The operators who thrive aren’t the ones chasing the myth. They’re the ones who did the math.

Watch all the sessions on demand for deeper discussion on these topics and to catch all the unfiltered takes from the event.

Todd Greenbaum
Todd Greenbaum
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