The Missing Piece in Your DTC Growth Strategy? Shipping

I’ve spent most of my career on the growth side of the business, where the mandate is clear: acquire customers, convert demand, and build experiences that keep people coming back. You learn quickly where to focus, and for years shipping rarely made that list. But times are changing.

EMARKETER projects that direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce will plateau at 19 percent of total U.S. e-commerce sales through 2028. That plateau reflects economics more than demand. The conditions that enabled rapid scaling — cheap acquisition, cheap capital, a willingness to defer profitability — have largely disappeared. Customer acquisition costs rose sharply following Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes in 2021. As capital tightened and competition intensified, it became clear to investors and go-to-market (GTM) teams alike that many digital-native brands struggled to build sustainable unit economics. For example, Allbirds lost $419 million over five fiscal years on $1.24 billion in sales. Casper, around the time of its IPO, was losing roughly 20 cents on every dollar of revenue.

When margins become the constraint, the places you look for answers change. You start looking more holistically at where value is created throughout the customer lifecycle. For most e-commerce brands, the final brand impression is not the website or app experience. It's delivery. That moment carries the highest expectations and some of the least understood costs. When DTC stopped being a growth story and became a profitability story, shipping became a growth variable.

Shipping has long operated separately from GTM, growth, and customer success. Typically, marketing teams define the offer — free shipping thresholds, delivery speed, season promotion — based on what drives conversion. Operations teams execute those promises. Finance evaluates the outcome after the fact, often when margins begin to compress. Each function optimizes within its own scope, but few share a common understanding of cost to serve.

Yet customers experience shipping as part of a brand’s promise. When delivery is late, returns are difficult, or unexpected costs appear, customers blame the brand, not the carrier.

Customer forums, reviews, and social channels reflect this consistently: complaints about delivery become complaints about the company itself. In mature e-commerce markets, research shows delivery performance directly influences satisfaction and repeat purchase behavior. When the delivery experience deteriorates, so do customer retention and lifetime value.

At LJM, we see this across e-commerce and CPG brands. In one recent engagement, a fast-growing DTC company showed healthy demand, strong conversion, and growing online sales. Yet shipping was quietly eroding both margin and customer experience. Delivery options didn't align with customer expectations, costs were misaligned with service levels, and the post-purchase experience failed to reinforce the brand.

By redesigning shipping to improve delivery options and optimize order routing, the company achieved an 18 percent lift in online sales, not through increased acquisition spend or pricing changes, but by treating shipping as a strategic lever.

That shift, from managing shipping as a cost center to designing it as a system, is what distinguishes DTC brands that are adapting. They ask: What does each order cost to deliver? Which delivery promises are profitable? How do those promises affect retention and lifetime value?

The next phase of e-commerce will be defined by closer integration between supply chain and growth. Growth teams will increasingly combine demand trends, parcel pricing, and shipping performance across customer and operational data platforms to better understand how delivery decisions influence acquisition, retention, and profitability. The brands that outperform won't simply spend more to acquire customers. They'll treat every delivery decision as a growth decision.

Gerryann Agovino is head of strategic partnerships and Marketing at LJM, a parcel shipping consultancy.