December 11, 2019
Slow and steady may have won the race for the tortoise. But it certainly won’t win peak season business for your company, particularly not if you’re talking about parcel shipping.
According to a 2019 Shopper Report from ElasticPath, 75% of consumers expect same-day delivery capability from all retail brands within the next year. And thanks to the ongoing growth of high-speed retailers like Amazon, two-day fulfillment shipping has largely become the norm.
The question is, can your holiday season supply chain keep pace? Just as important, how can you stack the odds of meeting customers’ increasingly faster shipping expectations in your favor?
One place to start is in the warehouse. Simply put, you can’t expect to offer rapid delivery to every part of the country if your DC is located in one remote corner of it – unless you and your customers are okay with paying extra for premium parcel shipping to come cities.
Cut-off times are also a factor. After all, an order that’s ready to ship even one minute after your parcel carriers have already made their daily pick-ups at your facility is likely to arrive a full 24 hours later than one that was ready to ship even just a few minutes before.
And what about staffing? Much like Santa famously relies on a vast number of elves to fill his sleigh with toys, you’ll undoubtedly need a larger-than-usual number of fulfillment personnel to help get all of your holiday orders out the door in a timely fashion. Just as important, you’ll need them at the same time as almost every other company – which means you can’t wait until the eleventh hour to hire seasonal personnel or make arrangements with temporary staffing agencies (because they’ll be especially busy during the holidays, too.)
Over the next few days, we’ll be talking more about these topics – and many others that impact your order-to-delivery times – so we hope you’ll check back with us frequently.
Read other blog posts from this 12-part series entitled "The 12 Days of Peak Season":
Day 1 of 12: Some Shoppers Who Wanted Shipping Free (The Problem Of Low-Cost Shipping)
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