Peak Season Preparedness: Using Final Mile Delivery Tracking in Multi-Carrier Shipping to Handle High Order Volumes
The holiday rush, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other seasonal peaks bring both opportunities and challenges for eCommerce businesses. As order volumes surge by 30-40% compared to regular business days, shipping operations face intense pressure, potentially leading to delays and disappointed customers. This is particularly significant considering that 84% of consumers are unlikely to return to a retailer after just one poor delivery experience.
Understanding Peak Season Challenges
Peak season is a critical period for eCommerce businesses, marked by high order volumes and shipping demands. During this time, logistics and fulfilment operations are put to the test, and businesses must be prepared to handle the increased pressure.
High order volumes can be overwhelming, especially during peak season. To manage this influx, businesses need a robust shipping strategy, including multi-carrier shipping. By leveraging multiple carriers, businesses can distribute their shipping load more evenly, ensuring no single carrier is overwhelmed.
Benefits of Multi-Carrier Shipping During Peak Season
Implementing a multi-carrier shipping solution offers several strategic advantages during high-volume periods:
Increased Carrier Capacity and Flexibility
By leveraging multiple carriers, retailers can distribute shipping volume across various providers, ensuring you always have capacity available when needed most. With GFS, you gain access to over 1,000 delivery services from our extensive carrier network, all through a single relationship.
Risk Mitigation Through Diversification
Relying on a single carrier can be particularly risky during Peak seasons when delays and capacity issues are more likely. A multi-carrier approach mitigates this risk by allowing you to seamlessly shift volume to alternative providers when needed.
Peak seasons often coincide with challenging weather conditions and other disruptions that can affect carrier performance. By diversifying across multiple carriers, you create built-in resilience against these disruptions, ensuring your deliveries continue smoothly despite potential challenges.
Enhanced Delivery Options and Tracking
The final mile is often the most challenging to manage, yet the most important from the customer’s perspective. Today’s consumers expect choice in how their orders are delivered.
GFS’ multi-carrier approach enables you to offer a wider range of delivery options to your customers, improving conversion rates and satisfaction.
GFS’ Enterprise Carrier Management technology provides unified tracking capabilities through GFS Seeker, enabling complete visibility throughout the delivery process.
Choosing the Right Multi-Carrier Solution
When evaluating options for the right multi-carrier solution for eCommerce businesses to support throughout the year and especially during Peak season, look for:
- Integration with your eCommerce platforms and sales channels
- Real-time visibility and tracking updates
- Competitive rates through consolidated volume
- Ability to handle high volumes of parcels
- Access to a diverse carrier network for maximum flexibility
GFS’ solutions tick all these boxes, providing a comprehensive approach to Peak season shipping challenges.
Key Strategies for Peak Season Preparedness
- Early Planning: Start conversations with GFS at least 3-4 months before your anticipated peak period to understand capacity forecasts and service offerings.
- Optimise Warehouse Operations: Before peak season hits, review your picking, packing, and shipping workflows to eliminate bottlenecks and ensure smooth processing of increased volumes.
- Enhance Final Mile Tracking: GFS Seeker keeps both you and your customers informed throughout the delivery journey, enabling proactive management of delivery exceptions before they impact customer satisfaction.
- Prepare for Returns: Peak season sales inevitably lead to peak season returns. GFS offers structured returns management solutions to handle increased volumes and provide a seamless experience for customers.
Peak season preparedness isn’t just about surviving the rush — it’s about creating a competitive advantage through superior delivery experiences. By implementing GFS’ multi-carrier shipping solution, you gain the flexibility, reliability and efficiency needed to handle high order volumes on the back end while maintaining customer satisfaction for the front end experience.
Sources: Convey report
