Where shoppers once had to find a website, search it, and click through endless steps before ordering, social media like TikTok and AI are now taking over.
Browse any trade journal, and you will find the same starting point again and again: how do we organize parcel delivery to keep pace with the slower e-commerce growth? It sounds like an important question, but increasingly it is the wrong one.
Where shoppers once had to find a website, search it, and click through endless steps before ordering, social media like TikTok and AI are taking over. The challenge is not volume, but the changing nature of online buying itself. Two developments are reshaping the playing field: social commerce and agentic commerce.
Discovery commerce
Take TikTok Shop, live in the Netherlands since 15 June. The classic customer journey (need, Google, compare, order) is turned upside down. Users open the app to be entertained, spot a product in a video, and check out without ever leaving the app. TikTok is one big Tupperware party: the seller is someone you know, the pressure is social, and nobody came to buy.
The purchase impulse arises while scrolling, not beforehand. And it works. Globally, revenue grew from 900 million dollars in 2021 to more than 64 billion dollars five years later; in Germany, 15 percent of online shoppers had bought through the platform within a year. And it has long ceased to be a youth channel: two-thirds of users are over thirty.
At the same time, agentic commerce is emerging from the other side: AI systems that take over searching, comparing, and ordering, driven by preferences, budgets, and usage patterns. The consumer is being pushed to the sidelines of their own purchasing process. The battle for the customer shifts from visibility to algorithms, from brand experience to price and availability.
Home delivery
For home delivery, the consequences are far-reaching. First: further fragmentation. Where a consumer puts three items in one basket at a webshop, TikTok triggers one impulse purchase per video: more shipments, lower value per shipment, more stops per street. Second: unpredictability. One viral video and a product suddenly sell 27 times per second, as TikTok reported on Black Friday in the UK.
Capacity planning based on weekly patterns no longer works when the algorithm drives demand. Third: returns. Impulse purchases without comparison, promoted by creators on commission. The disappointment is baked in; return rates are correspondingly high. Agentic commerce will soon add hyper-efficient, but entirely price-driven ordering flows on top, in which loyalty to the carrier or the channel evaporates.
Buying behavior is being shaped upstream by an algorithm in California and a fulfillment center in Guangzhou, while the consequences land on a residential street. There are serious concerns, too. The Dutch Consumers’ Association speaks of a toxic cocktail of ill-considered purchases. Young people in particular are vulnerable, because advertising, entertainment and social pressure are almost impossible to tell apart. The market will not fix this on its own; the DSA and the new EU ‘stop button’ show that Brussels can indeed intervene at the front end.
Optimize or innovate?
The parcel sector’s reflex will be to optimize. Smarter routes, better forecasting models, extra capacity and lower rates. But that is treating the symptoms. The real question is whether we dare to redesign the underlying processes. Make parcel lockers and PUDO points the default option for low-value impulse purchases. Require platforms to bundle shipments to the same address. Price returns fairly, so that the cost of throwaway purchases is not passed on to the chain and the living environment.
Anyone who only tweaks the classic order-and-deliver button is chasing the facts. E-commerce will find its way back up not just through more of the same, but through a fundamentally different design of the customer journey. And with it, of the last mile. The consumer thinks they are in the driver’s seat. In reality, the algorithm and the agent steer the ordering behavior. And is the parcel courier left picking up the bill?
Walther Ploos van Amstel