Source
This runs on Red Stag Fulfillment's own lead capture form, exported April 21, 2026. That export holds 11,052 total form submissions, and 6,245 of them had something written in the "Additional Details from Form" field. Those written answers are what we analyzed. No survey and no panel: every line is a brand's own answer to the one question that field asks, "What is your biggest fulfillment challenge right now?" So every response is a direct answer to a pointed question, not a volunteered aside.
Big-and-heavy cohort
A submission makes the cohort if the product itself is big, heavy, or bulky, judged by reading the brand's answer and product description. A reported per-unit weight of 11 lbs or more auto-qualifies regardless of the text. This replaced an older automated keyword gate that let contamination in (books that ship "in bulk", supplements described with dimensions) and missed products that are bulky but light (cat furniture, lamp shades, five-gallon jugs). After a screen that removed 60 inbound solicitations and test entries, that leaves 1,849 qualifying inquiries in the January 2025 to April 2026 window, from roughly 1,778 different companies. When one company reached out more than once, we counted each inquiry on its own.
Data window and edition
This is the 2026 edition. Like most annual State-of reports, we title it for the year it comes out and run the numbers on the most recent data: first-party inquiries from January 2025 to April 2026 (n=1,849). That splits into 2025 (n=1,367) and 2026 so far, through April (n=482). 2026 on its own is too thin to slice four ways by volume and fifteen ways by category, so the rankings run on the combined 2025+2026 window. 2024 (n=190) sits outside the core cohort and shows up only as the first point in the trend lines.
Big-and-heavy vs. light-parcel comparison
The heavy-vs-light view puts the two groups side by side from the same form, across the January 2025 to April 2026 window: big-and-heavy n=1,849 against light-parcel n=3,352, which is every written submission in the window that did not make the big-and-heavy cohort, screened the same way for junk. Lift is just the heavy share divided by the light share.
Classification
We classified each answer against a written codebook of 16 challenge categories, tagging a category when it was the headline of a brand's answer or a clear secondary need. Fifteen of those sixteen are presented in this edition. This replaced an older automated keyword classifier whose precision we had measured as low on several categories, which is what prompted the rebuild. An answer can carry more than one category, and the rankings count how often each is named. The 11 lb weight rule is applied deterministically in code. One scope note worth stating plainly: the Inbound logistics category counts only inbound-related mentions, such as importing product into the US, customs and brokerage, drayage, and tariffs. Outbound international shipping and foreign brands entering the US market are not counted in it.
Validation
We checked the classification against an independent second pass over a 300-row stratified gold set, labeled separately and blind to the first. The big-and-heavy cohort gate agreed at an F1 of 0.98. Ten of the sixteen categories scored above 0.84; six softer ones run more conservative, so read their shares as floors rather than exact counts. Five of those six appear in this report: scalability, receiving, geography, speed, and finding a capable 3PL. Individual labels vary slightly on a re-run, but that noise is unbiased, so the aggregate rankings hold steady.
View used
Every share on the page is "share of responses": the percentage of inquiries in a group that raised a category, counting a topic when it was the headline of their answer or a clear secondary need and excluding passing, incidental mentions. The plain read is "how many brands like me raised this." Because a single answer can raise more than one topic, the shares do not sum to 100%.
What the form doesn't capture
The form captures weight, but not product dimensions, cube, or DIM weight. We work around that by reading how each brand describes its product. Even so, products that are large but light and don't describe themselves (say, a 5-lb folded tent that's high-cube on a pallet) can still be under-counted here.
Why weight isn't sliced by volume
We show the weight bands and the order-volume bands each on the full dataset, but we never cross the two. The cohort leans heavily one way (most of it sits in a single volume band, and the 10,000+ tier is only n=61), so slicing weight by volume would leave cells too small to publish honestly. Both cuts stay cohort-wide.
Anonymization
Every submission is anonymized: no company names, no identifying details, only the industry where it's present.
Caveats worth knowing
2026 is a partial year (January to April), so seasonal categories may move and the 2026 figures are directional. Sensitivity: the headline ranking barely moves whatever denominator or salience cutoff you use, and cost and storage hold the top two throughout. Inquiries are not the same as brands: the 1,849 inquiries come from roughly 1,778 different companies, and a few brands reached out many times, so the inquiry count runs a little ahead of the number of brands. Representativeness: these are people who came to Red Stag Fulfillment looking for big-and-heavy fulfillment, not a random sample of the whole market. Year-over-year moves are tested on a like-for-like January-to-April window; four clear a two-proportion test against 2024 and the rest are within noise.