A New Year brings new beginnings. For the B2B freight and logistics landscape, those new beginnings have been simmering in the background ever since President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, in combination with other macro factors, worked to upend the old assumptions underpinning much of the sector’s economics.
For much of the past year, rates across ocean, rail, last mile, and across the bulk of the freight and shipping landscape rose and fell without sticking, while trade volumes shifted geographically without restoring pricing power.
And with 2026 already off to the races, the parcel and freight logistics sector is undergoing renewed upheaval, driven by Amazon’s expanding footprint and its growing influence on market structure. Established carriers and the U.S. Postal Service, meanwhile, are responding with sharper pricing strategies, tighter cost controls and continued efforts to streamline their networks.
For B2B shippers, especially those supporting omnichannel or B2B2C models, the last mile in 2026 is no longer a commodity. It is a design problem, where packaging, address quality, service-level discipline and network strategy determine cost outcomes.
Looking ahead, companies are reconfiguring supply chains around total cost of ownership, weighing tariffs, transportation, inventory and service levels in integrated models. The reset for the logistics landscape in 2026 may not be about retreating from globalization, but about operating within a more fragmented, rules-driven system.
See also: CFOs Rewrote the Playbook on Supply Chain Risk in 2025
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How Better Spend Governance Is Stabilizing Logistics Performance
Among the defining features of today’s logistics environment is not just rate volatility, but freight and shipping asymmetry. Capacity is available across most modes, yet carrier margins remain under pressure. Rates fluctuate seasonally but lack durability. This has exposed a hard truth for many organizations: simply negotiating lower base rates does not reliably translate into lower total logistics costs.
This reframing can help stabilize performance by reducing cost surprises. When spend is governed at the rule level, such as how shipments are packaged, tendered and routed, logistics outcomes become more predictable, even in soft markets.
This stability matters operationally. When logistics teams are not forced into constant renegotiation or crisis management, service performance improves. Lead times stabilize. Carrier relationships become more collaborative. Internal planning horizons lengthen. Governance, in effect, converts market softness into operational breathing room.
In the June CAIO Report, “The Enterprise Reset: Tariffs, Uncertainty and the Limits of Operational Response,” PYMNTS Intelligence found 60% of firms reported that they are addressing today’s tariff-induced challenges through tighter partner coordination, smarter sourcing contract terms, more dynamic price modeling and greater alignment between finance and procurement functions.
The years’ worth of data in the PYMNTS Intelligence 2025 Uncertainty Project found that companies that treated tariffs as a procurement problem struggled to respond effectively and with a longer-term view to operational uncertainties. Those that embedded trade considerations into broader spend governance frameworks were comparatively able to adapt more effectively. These firms rebalanced sourcing and aligned transportation decisions with total cost of ownership models.
PYMNTS also covered how real-time data became fundamental to supply chain decision-making, enabling CFOs to rethink procurement as a lever for operational resilience, and helping finance and procurement work together to map out supply chains in real time.
Read more: Three New Year’s Resolutions CFOs Are Making About Data and AI
The Logistics and Freight Economy’s Structural Shift
Perhaps the most visible marker of change across the logistics landscape in 2025 was upstream, in global trade flows themselves. China remains the world’s manufacturing engine, but its role as the default supplier to the U.S. market has materially weakened.
According to an industry report, what replaced that volume was not a single alternative, but a distributed network. Southeast Asia has emerged as the clearest beneficiary of the shift. Vietnam, Thailand and their regional peers absorbed growing shares of U.S.-bound manufacturing, with exports from ASEAN nations to the U.S. rising sharply year over year. Mexico, meanwhile, quietly crossed a symbolic threshold, surpassing China as the largest source of U.S. imports by value, driven by nearshoring in mechanical, electrical and automotive supply chains.
For logistics providers, this geographic dispersion matters more than headline trade numbers. A diversified sourcing base fragments freight demand across more lanes, more ports and more inland corridors. Volume still exists, but it is less concentrated, less predictable and harder to monetize at scale.
Critically for B2B firms dealing with their logistics providers, better spend governance in logistics is not about austerity. It is about optionality. By understanding where costs originate and how decisions propagate through the network, companies gain the flexibility to respond to change without destabilizing performance.
It’s against this backdrop that by improving data quality and integrating logistics decisions more closely with payments, organizations can potentially find new ways to stabilize costs, improve forecasting accuracy and build resilience across supply chain operations, even as external conditions remain uncertain.
