As the delivery ecosystem evolves at pace, the fabric underpinning partnerships between carriers, tech partners and brands is also shifting.

Speaking at The Delivery Conference, Selfridge’s Head of Supply Chain, Amy Allen, ZigZag’s Founder & CEO, Al Gerrie, and Evri’s CCO, David Saenz, joined Josh Steinitz, Chief Strategy Officer at ShipStation, to discuss how value, trust and curiosity are becoming the bedrock of long-term collaborative success.

Putting true collaboration at the core

While collaboration and transparency have always been central to successful tech-brand partnerships, Evri’s Saenz said these values have become more pronounced in recent years. As margin pressures have mounted and ROI becomes more vigilantly scrutinised, tech partnerships must also be viewed through the lens of optimisation and value delivery, he said.

In search of value and efficiencies, “everybody is now focused on optimising their ways of working,” he said, meaning no tech provider can exist in a vacuum. He added that now partners “need to match clients’ efforts at driving efficiency and innovation in their supply chains – and that can’t work without more collaboration and transparency.”

Saenz highlighted a recent example where Evri had worked with second-hand marketplace Vinted to improve fraud detection. Bringing together their collective datasets, they have created a predictive system that identifies and removes fake deliveries from the network, translating into £1million in saving over the past year – something that wouldn’t have been possible if either party was working in isolation.

Selfridges’ Allen echoed the need for collaboration and for “stronger collaborative networks” that “address a number of problems across the business end-to-end.” She added that, as Selfridges operates a “truly customer-led” supply chain, it needs “a real understanding of the customer impact and where partners add value.”

Invest time, not just tech weight

Allen also highlighted the importance of proactivity – and challenging the retailer – in creating true, long-term partnerships. “A partner that treats your business as if they were working for you directly – or it’s their cash or their customer at the end of the line” – is the stress test of true collaboration, she said.

And, for Allen, that can only come through the investment of time and curiosity over and above the capabilities of a solution alone.

“It’s about technology providers having the curiosity to look into the way you’re operating and striving to continuously improve,” she added. “It’s those incremental, added value opportunities that create longevity – and the real test of any partnership is longevity.”

Building resilience within partner networks

Picking the right partners – but ensuring solution networks span enough technologies to scale and adapt is “a fine balance,” said Allen. “Having a breadth of partners ‘just in case’ isn’t really going to give anybody significant benefit,” she said. But “having real definition in your ambitions and everybody having a core place in your supply chain is important.”

ZigZag’s Gerrie agreed, saying that “as commerce evolves, we’ve got to move with the times and ensure collaboration is there. We can’t just try and build everything ourselves; we have to make our solutions flexible to move ahead.”

Resilience is also about building agility into the supply chain, and Allen suggests collaboration shouldn’t just be a linear relationship between a retailer and a single technology provider.

“Our suppliers are forming new strategic partnerships themselves, and that’s creating a really interesting space for value add and resilience,” she said. “If that [potential] can be unlocked, then there’s an opportunity for both commercial and CX value, both for retailers and suppliers.”

Selfridges, ZigZag and Evri were speaking at The Delivery Conference 2026, the leading retail, ecommerce and logistics innovation event hosted by Metapack and ShipStation.