The national parcel carriers that once set retail delivery economics have spent a decade shedding their least profitable packages, and the space left behind is now crowded with regional carriers, 3PL cross-dock networks, gig courier platforms and private fleets — almost none of which talk to each other, according to FreightWaves. Burq, a last-mile delivery technology company, is wagering that the product enterprise retailers will pay for is last-mile orchestration: the decision layer sitting above that fragmented bench.
Carrier diversification erodes the duopoly
FreightWaves reported in July that carrier diversification is eroding the last-mile delivery duopoly: 55% of retailers now use carriers outside FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, and more than a third are actively moving volume away from the two national giants. The payoff is measurable — home goods brand Caraway cut total parcel costs 20% after its 3PL began shopping every order across a network of regional and national carriers.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Retailers using carriers outside FedEx, UPS, USPS | 55% |
| Retailers actively shifting volume away from national giants | More than a third |
| Caraway total parcel cost reduction | 20% |
Capturing that value requires knowing which provider performs in which ZIP code on which day, and most retailers do not know, because the systems that pick a carrier stop watching the moment the order leaves.
Burq's bet: a decision layer on top
Jake Stein joined Burq four months ago to run growth for its retail sector, after four and a half years at Uber launching ship-from-store, same-day and on-demand programs on Uber Direct. The limitations of a single network pushed him out.
"It still came down to that Uber couldn’t be the single source for everything," Stein told FreightWaves. "Mostly gig, reasonably shorter distances, some batching but not large scale, no big and bulky. And they can’t be 100% of every possible location."
Stein described the fallback pitch — adding more providers — as creating a new challenge: "Our sales pitch sort of sometimes fell on ‘well, you should have more than one provider,’ and then what does that mean? How does that get orchestrated? What intelligence is behind making those decisions?"
He said there has been a movement over at least the last 10 years where enterprise-scale companies are looking beyond one, two or even three national providers: "It’s a whole host of regional providers just for their parcel." Layered with 3PL cross-docking and a private fleet, the delivery promise starts to close on Amazon — but the management of it does not.
After the OMS hands off
Large retailers already run distributed order management through platforms such as Manhattan or IBM Sterling. Those systems decide where an order ships from based on inventory location, distance, cost and service levels. They are also expensive, Stein said, putting mid-market and small companies at a disadvantage.
The gap Burq targets opens the moment that decision is executed.
"Once things leave the OMS and they’ve gone out into, let’s say, the parcel carrier or to your own fleet to deliver, even to a third-party gig platform that is like an Uber or a DoorDash," Stein said, "they don’t know what happens after that. There’s no constant monitoring of what’s going on."
A package promised in two days that has not been scanned at the pickup point is, in most operations, a customer service call waiting to happen. Burq's orchestration could enable redispatch: "We could say, you know what, we’re going to redispatch or cancel the order with the first courier/carrier and send it to the other carrier who’s a better performance level and we know is more than likely to pick it up," Stein said.
"There’s really nothing out there that exists that can orchestrate across all of those different nodes and modes and SLAs," he added.
What operators should take from this
For logistics managers and 3PL operators, the source suggests a shift in how last-mile performance is tracked. The systems that pick a carrier stop monitoring the order once it leaves, which means service failures are found too late. Orchestration tools that sit above the carrier bench and monitor performance in real time could become the differentiator — and Burq's pitch, according to FreightWaves, is that this is the product enterprise retailers will pay for.
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