Customers prioritise reliable deliveries over speed: APAC study

India’s e-commerce and quick commerce sectors have spent billions chasing speed. New research suggests they may have been solving the wrong problem all along.

According to the Eye on the Last Mile 6.0 APAC report, unveiled on May 21, 2026, at Last Mile Leaders Asia in Bangkok, when operators across the Asia-Pacific region were asked to name the single customer promise that matters most, predictable delivery time was the clear winner — chosen by 41 per cent of respondents. Fastest possible delivery trailed at just 22 per cent. Real-time tracking visibility, a capability the industry has spent a decade marketing and building, was chosen by a mere 10 per cent. The report was produced by FarEye in partnership with ASCLA and SCMAP.  Speaking at the event, Kushal Nahata, Co-founder and CEO of FarEye, said, “The next frontier is not speed — it is reliability, intelligence, and cost clarity. Operators who crack that convergence first will define the category. India has every reason to lead.” The implication for India — where 10-minute and 20-minute delivery has attracted billions in investment and dominated logistics headlines for three years — is pointed: the capital flowing into speed infrastructure may be partially misdirected. Reliability, not velocity, is what customers are actually paying for.

And paying is precisely what customers are willing to do. Sixty percent of operators surveyed said their customers would pay extra for delivery - a commercial signal that Indian retailers and ecommerce players are, for the most part, still missing, at a time when free or subsidised delivery remains the competitive default.

The challenge of doing any of this profitably is growing steeper. The report, based on structured surveys of 500+ operators across Southeast Asia, Australia & New Zealand, and adjacent APAC markets, found that delivery costs have risen 18.9% year-on-year on average. In India, where fuel prices, driver wages, and urban congestion are structural and stubborn, the number itself is no surprise. What is surprising is the nature of the blind spot operators are working with.

Operators can see where cost lands - fuel, labour, vehicles, carrier bills - but not where it is actually created. The real margin leakage is buried in failed deliveries, rescheduling loops, poor carrier allocation, and unused capacity. In Indian cities, where first-attempt delivery failure rates can run between 20% and 30%, this hidden cost layer is not a marginal concern. It is a primary profit drain.

Seventy-five percent of operators cite inefficient routing as their single biggest operational bottleneck, with 57% pointing to driver availability as the second - a finding with direct resonance for India’s vast and volatile gig workforce.

AI Investment Is Real. Execution Is Not.

India has positioned itself as an AI-first economy, and its logistics sector has followed suit. The data, however, reveals a significant gap between ambition and delivery.

A striking 98.3% of operators say they trust AI to solve their last-mile challenges. Yet only 15% have reached what the report calls extensive adoption - the stage where AI is actively driving operating decisions rather than merely informing them. The largest cohort, 43% of operators, is stuck in early implementation: committed to AI, but unable to connect it to their existing systems.

The barriers are overwhelmingly technical, not cultural. Integration complexity accounts for 27% of all cited obstacles. Internal expertise gaps account for 20%. Poor data quality accounts for 18%. Not a single respondent named lack of trust in AI as their barrier.

For India - with its legacy transport management systems, fragmented carrier data standards, and a logistics technology skills gap - the diagnosis is clear. The investment is there. The plumbing is not ready.

On the question of how to structure delivery capacity, the industry appears to have reached a consensus. Sixty-two percent of operators already run primarily outsourced carrier networks. Yet 48% of all operators - regardless of their current model - plan to increase outsourcing over the next five years.

Neither pure ownership nor pure outsourcing survives the pressures of volume volatility and rising customer-experience expectations. The market is converging on hybrid orchestration: a guaranteed core capacity layer sitting alongside flexible outsourced and gig capacity. In India, where carrier ecosystems vary dramatically by state and city, this model is less a strategic preference and more an operational necessity.