PARCEL Industry: The AI-Powered Holiday Shopping Season Is Here. Can Shipping Keep Up?
AI is now part of the purchase for a large share of holiday shoppers, but in a new byline for PARCEL Industry, Ship.com founder and CEO Joe DiSorbo points out that the work behind the order hasn’t kept pace. Many independent sellers still handle rates, addresses, labels, and tracking by hand, and at holiday volume those small errors compound into surcharges, returned packages, and unhappy customers.
DiSorbo argues that commerce platforms serving large seller networks should treat shipping as core infrastructure rather than something sellers solve elsewhere. He describes what embedded, API-first shipping looks like in practice, with rate comparison, address validation, batch processing, and proactive tracking updates, and how it shifts the seller’s role from doing every step to reviewing exceptions. He also makes the case for a clear line between preparing work and spending money, with seller approval required until trust is earned, and for using shipping data as an early-warning signal for platforms trying to retain sellers.
He closes by looking ahead to agentic commerce, where AI agents buy on a shopper’s behalf and need delivery cost, timing, and tracking as real-time, machine-readable data. Sellers whose shipping information lives in spreadsheets or separate portals, he says, will be invisible to those agents.
