Every year, retail procurement runs the same play on the Transpacific trade. Carrier rounds run through the winter, and the bulk of long-term contracts get signed between Q2 and Q3, with the season peaking around May. For a few weeks, that number feels like a win.
Then peak season hits. A general rate increase lands. A peak-season surcharge shows up on an invoice nobody remembers agreeing to. By the time back-to-school volumes are moving, the rate paid in July has drifted well past the rate signed in May. The tender closed months ago on paper. In practice, the negotiation kept running.
That gap between what retail procurement signs and what it actually pays has grown too large to treat as noise. It's the difference between owning a cost line and explaining an unplanned variance on a board slide.
The stakes just got bigger
Retail margin is under more pressure than it has been in years. Tariffs alone have cut roughly a full point off gross margin in exposed apparel categories, with the bill split between price increases passed to shoppers and margin absorbed by retailers and their manufacturers, according to Deloitte's 2026 Global Retail Industry Outlook. Consumers, squeezed by the same inflation, are trading down and hunting for value, adding to the promotional pressure retailers are already fighting on the shelf.
At the same time, the ground under sourcing is shifting. Most supply chain leaders have moved at least part of their production away from China, adding a second sourcing country or bringing manufacturing closer to the destination market, and are carrying more buffer inventory to hedge the disruption that comes with it — a shift C.H. Robinson's supply chain trends research has been tracking closely. Every one of those moves works against the lean, low-cost operating model retail has run on for a decade — landing pressure on the same line: ocean freight.
For a retailer importing FOB from Asian factories, ocean is one of the largest cost lines procurement actually controls, which is exactly why it draws board-level attention the moment margin tightens.
That pressure is already showing up on the water. NRF's Global Port Tracker reports that U.S. import volumes have already peaked for the year, with retailers stocked up ahead of the holidays after pulling orders forward by four to six weeks to beat expected tariff increases. Christmas trees are a clean example: most are made in China, and importers are locking in smaller, earlier shipments months ahead of the holiday rather than risk a late, tariff-hit container missing the selling window entirely. The same pressure sits on every retail tender. Front-loading doesn't just move a shipping date, it reshapes when peak season happens and how much capacity is left for the freight that didn't move early, which is one more reason a rate locked in Q2 can't be treated as settled through the rest of the year.
Some retailers will see this coming. Others will get caught by it.
The pattern shows up on every call
Retail's freight pain shows up on call after call with procurement, freight, and logistics teams. The pattern repeats: the annual tender gets signed, then peak-season increases and a surcharge stack erodes the signed rate before the next quarterly review. Rates sit scattered across hundreds of lanes in spreadsheets, with no single view of what was agreed versus what's actually being billed. One retail procurement lead described building the tender analysis by hand each year, because no tool did it for them. That's the default state for a category most teams still manage the way they did five years ago.
Retailers running the category this way tend to lose the same savings twice: once when a carrier prices a surcharge in after the ink is dry, and again when leadership asks procurement to explain a variance nobody can fully account for. In a soft-demand, margin-squeezed year, that second cost is the one that lingers. It's the moment procurement stops looking like the function protecting the business and starts looking like the one caught flat-footed by its own suppliers.
The retailers pulling ahead are running the category differently. They treat ocean freight the way they already treat every other major spend line, with a daily, lane-level view of the market instead of a single number revisited once a year. They open round two of a tender already knowing where the market actually sits, rather than relying on what the carrier says it is. When a surcharge lands on an invoice, they can tell within days whether it holds up, while there's still time to push back. And they know where space is tight on their specific lanes before peak arrives, so a capacity crunch is a routing decision instead of a scramble — a gap that shows up on more retail calls than surcharge disputes do.
Built to adapt, not to predict
There's no forecasting away a general rate increase, a surcharge, or a capacity crunch at exactly the wrong moment. Ocean freight will keep throwing up surprises no annual tender can see coming, tariffs and front-loading are only making the calendar less predictable, and no tool changes that. What separates the retailers pulling ahead isn't a better crystal ball. It's resilience: the ability to see a surprise the moment it lands and respond before it becomes an unexplained line on a board slide, instead of finding out at invoice.
Building that resilience doesn't take a bigger team. It takes one source of truth across every lane, in place of hundreds of spreadsheet rows updated by hand between calls. It takes a surcharge stack checked against the market instead of accepted on a carrier's word. It takes visibility into carrier reliability and capacity on the lanes that matter most, so peak-season allocation is a planned decision instead of a scramble. And it takes a tender that opens already anchored to where the market sits — a view Xeneta's 2026 Ocean Outlook tracks across every major trade — so round one starts from fact rather than a supplier's opening number.
Put those four things in place, and the surprises don't stop coming. What changes is how fast procurement sees them, and how ready they are with a number leadership can trust the moment margin comes into question.
The tender never really ends in Q2. The only question is whether procurement can keep pace with the market after it closes.
See what this shift looks like in practice. Read The 2026 Freight Report for how retail procurement teams are responding to disruption before their next tender, or explore how Xeneta supports retail freight procurement year-round.
