Holiday Shipping Guidance

Hi Everyone, 

Although ops teams are still busy with the tail end of BFCM, things are still expected to stay busy at this time of year for logistics leaders.

At this point, switching carriers or reinventing your shipping strategy is not realistic, but there are still things you can do to capture revenue and delight your customers.

You may already be familiar or have experimented with messages like “Order within X time to receive by Y!” on your checkout page.

The accuracy of this guarantee becomes extra important during the holiday season. You don’t want to be the company who ruined Christmas. 

If you are too conservative with your shipping estimates, you will scare away people who would have ordered, and you’ll miss out on revenue you would have captured. 

If you are too risky, you will ruin Christmas for not a few, but many of your customers, and you will risk serious reputation risk.

The best way to handle this is to populate a shipping estimate after the customer has entered their destination address, so you know both the distance and shipping carrier before you tell the customer how long it will take to arrive.

Ex. Shipping one state over might take 2 days, versus 7 days if shipping cross-country.

You may be thinking to yourself that this is the responsibility of the shipping companies or your 3PL, but that’s not the full truth.

If you are working with a third party for setting shipping expectations, ask them how they plan to adjust their shipping expectations for the holiday season. They should be able to coherently tell you how they are mitigating against risks.

In reality, as a brand owner, you also own the shipping experience. And if some companies have a delightful shipping experience, while yours is sub-par, you will suffer. 

Every Friday over the month of December, I’m hosting free holiday shipping calls.

So If you have any questions about your shipping and logistics during the holiday season, just reply to this email and we’ll get your strategy sorted.