Two numbers that shouldn't both be true
The National Retail Federation's Global Port Tracker, produced with Hackett Associates, revised its June forecast upward to 2.25 million twenty-foot-equivalent units moving through major US ports, a 14.3% increase over June 2025. On its own, that looks like a retail sector restocking with confidence.
It isn't. Hackett Associates founder Ben Hackett told the National Retail Federation the increase reflects retailers bringing forward their peak season cargo to mitigate increasing shipping costs and concerns about punitive replacement tariffs, not rising demand. Separately, in reporting on the same period, Hackett said forward demand is weakening, and that retailers have resisted large-scale restocking despite the seasonal push. Forecasts for the second half of the year point to import volumes falling below 2025 levels.
Read those two statements together and the June number stops looking like optimism. It looks like retailers moving goods early to dodge a cost increase, then deliberately keeping the resulting inventory thin. That is not the same decision, and treating it as one number obscures what retail tech buyers are actually being asked to solve for this year.
Frontloading is a hedge, not a forecast
A retailer that frontloads imports ahead of a tariff deadline is managing a known, dated cost. A retailer that refuses to rebuild inventory afterward is managing an unknown one: how much of that cost gets passed to shoppers before demand cracks. Those are two different problems, and they call for two different kinds of software.
The first is a logistics and timing problem, largely already solved by freight forwarders and customs brokers reacting to tariff calendars. The second is harder, and it's the one retail tech vendors have spent 2026 pitching against: demand sensing and replenishment systems that read point-of-sale data continuously instead of on a weekly batch cycle, so a buyer isn't committing to six months of stock on a guess made in March.
That pitch only works if retailers actually believe the software closes the gap between not knowing what demand looks like in October and being comfortable ordering for October anyway. The Global Port Tracker numbers suggest they don't, not yet. Retailers are hedging with timing, not with better forecasting confidence.
The sourcing shift is slower than the marketing
The other half of the supply chain story this year has been nearshoring, and here the gap between stated intent and actual movement is even wider. A Capgemini survey covered by Supply Chain Dive found 56% of executives planning to nearshore or combine nearshoring with reshoring in 2026. But 54% of chief supply chain officers in the same research said shifting even 25% of supply to regional sources takes more than 12 months.
That is the honest version of the supply chain resilience story retail tech marketing has been telling all year. It is not that retailers decided against diversifying sourcing. It is that diversifying sourcing is slow, contractual, and dependent on manufacturing capacity that doesn't exist yet in the regions retailers want to move to. Software can model the shift. It cannot manufacture the factories.
What this actually means for the rest of the year
None of this points to a retail sector in crisis. It points to one making a specific, defensible bet: absorb the near-term tariff cost by moving goods early, then refuse to commit further capital to inventory until demand is clearer. That is a rational response to genuine uncertainty, and it's a more coherent story than a narrative of AI transforming retail supply chains overnight, which is the framing most vendor content defaulted to this year.
The retailers who look best positioned heading into the back half of 2026 are not the ones with the most advanced forecasting tools. They're the ones who accepted that forecasting confidence is genuinely lower right now, and built inventory strategy around that fact rather than around what a vendor's dashboard says it can predict. The technology matters less this year than the discipline to not overtrust it.
Sources: National Retail Federation: Import Cargo Volume Forecast · Retail Insight Network / Yahoo Finance: US retailers hold back on inventory rebuild · Supply Chain Dive: 5 supply chain management trends to watch in 2026