CustomerThink: Why the Fulfillment Gap is Undermining Marketing’s Biggest Investments

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Read the full article here.

With significant investments into digital storefronts, complete with product storytelling and sophisticated customer acquisition strategies, brands are keeping up with their online competition, yet a critical factor is undermining their long-term success.

Looking at over 250 transactions across several. categories (Apparel, Beauty, Nutrition, Food & Beverage) the Stord 2025 Mystery Shopping Report, shows a critical and consistent shortfall in the buying experience. Brands are investing heavily in digital presence, but are falling short on basic customer expectations regarding fulfillment and the post-purchase experience. This misalignment creates a significant expectations-experience gap.

With online retail projected to exceed $1.6 trillion in the U.S. by 2027, this growth has also normalized exceedingly high standards set by services like Amazon Prime, making anything less than fast, reliable, and transparent delivery feel suboptimal to the average consumer, regardless of where they make their purchase.

This gap should alarm marketing leaders because operational failures directly translate to higher customer acquisition costs (CAC), lost lifetime value (CLV), and measurable brand erosion. Competitive differentiation is no longer primarily defined by the campaigns that consumers see before they make a purchase, but instead by the reliability of the supply chain. Thus, the brands that close these operational gaps are positioned to capture disproportionate growth.

Let’s explore a few areas where this gap in expectations and delivery are affecting brands’ ability to meaningfully compete and keep customers.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Read the full article here.