The Maze: Retailers face a familiar planning trap: assuming customers will move as quickly as the strategy deck. DHL, the parcel and logistics company, asked online shoppers where they expect to browse and buy more over the next five years. It separately asked ecommerce businesses how they expect customer behavior to change. Businesses anticipate more use of every channel more often than shoppers do. The largest difference is in social media, followed by artificial-intelligence chat and virtual assistants. That makes the findings useful for deciding what to test, rather than treating every new interface as inevitable.
Social shopping carries the biggest expectation gap. In DHL's comparison, 64% of businesses expect customers to browse and buy more through social media, while 24% of shoppers expect to do so themselves. The difference is 40 percentage points: subtracting the two response rates, rather than calculating sales growth. Social shopping means browsing or buying through social platforms. For a retailer, the practical risk is building a sales plan around a migration customers have not yet promised. The survey cannot show whether business optimism will prove wrong, but it exposes the assumption worth checking.
Interest in AI shopping exists, but business expectations run further ahead. AI-powered chat and virtual assistants let people express what they want in ordinary language rather than navigate only through categories and filters. Here, 59% of businesses expect more customer use, compared with 23% of shoppers: a 36-point difference. In the original LinkedIn post, brand builder Jack Rogers proposes letting shoppers ask for a room's worth of matching furniture or narrow products by specific needs. These illustrate a possible service, not a measured result. A retailer could test whether such help makes finding a suitable product easier before funding a complete navigation rebuild.
Established channels still have a place in customers' plans. Shopper expectations for more marketplace use reach 34%; apps and retailer websites each reach 32%. All three exceed social media's 24% and AI chat's 23%. Businesses still expect more expansion: 54% for marketplaces, 55% for apps and 63% for websites. The evidence supports improving useful existing journeys alongside experiments. It does not support abandoning a website because a conversational interface looks newer. Shoppable ads, product subscriptions and voice search also show business expectations above shopper intentions, so the pattern extends beyond AI excitement.
The comparison is a planning signal with clear limits. DHL's methodology covers 29,000 shoppers in 29 countries and 5,800 businesses in 28 countries, surveyed from December 15, 2025 to February 11, 2026. These are separate populations answering related questions. The percentages measure respondents expecting more use, not the share of spending a channel will capture. People may increase several channels together. International retailers also overlap with interfaces such as apps. The results describe sampled active ecommerce markets; they do not predict every country's behavior or establish that a particular merchant is overinvesting.
Why it matters: Channel investment should follow a customer problem and a measurable improvement. A useful experiment might compare how easily shoppers find an appropriate product with and without conversational help, then examine completed purchases and service cost. That is an operator's test suggested by the findings, not a result DHL measured. The survey gives retailers a reason to question ambitious adoption assumptions before those assumptions become fixed costs.
