Tips to Ensure Efficient Delivery of Your Orders in Peak Shipping Season
Most retail businesses, especially eCommerce struggle a lot in their order fulfillment during the peak season of Christmas and New Year.
Starting from Thanksgiving to year-end, it is the time period when people buy and send gifts to their close ones and friends as well as business associates as a token of love and friendship. Naturally, a bulk of revenue is earned by companies producing and selling consumer items during that time of the year. With whopping demand, it is a make-or-break situation for the retailers. Apart from scaling up their production, what’s equally concerning for them is fast shipping services. Efficient and uninterrupted delivery of your products are necessary to ensure that consumers can receive the products or gift anything to their loved ones at the right time.
Handling the peak season holiday deliveries demand and maintaining a consistent order flow along while preventing the cost surge is challenging. However, there are several ways you to overcome the shipping challenge and get the best out of the festive season. Getting an expert third-party delivery services provider will help you to deal with peak season volume with much more professionalism and keep customers happy with faster deliveries.
Top Tips to Deal with Peak Season Shipping in Your Business
#1 Organize Your Storage
Delivery of your products can be more efficient and timely when their storage is properly managed. With a sudden rise in demand, management of storage and warehouse gets difficult. With high volumes of items ready to ship, workers could misplace anything, damage an item, mix SKUs or make any errors due to haphazard situations. These cause delay in preparing for the deliveries. It is advisable to organize your storage or warehouse facility so that you can process the order deliveries faster when peak season sales start.
#2 Automation of Systems
One of the effective ways to deal with faster order fulfillment and shipping is the mechanization of processes through software systems. Update all your software and technical devices to ensure they can administer higher volumes of products. From data-tracking of inflow and outflow of goods to keeping proper records of money receipts, there are many aspects where software solutions can be used. They will help you with real-time visibility, prompt and accurate reporting, reduction in hassles for workers and timely deporting of products. This is why, outsourcing your storage and distribution and shipping is always preferable because they work with these latest technologies and software to ensure seamless fulfillment of orders, irrespective of the volumes.
#3 Be Flexible
To deal with fluctuations in demand, you need to be flexible enough i.e. can expand your warehouse space, deploy temporary hubs to handle the overflow of products, adding up working hours or days or services. Flexible shipping services also mean providing various services like same day delivery, next-day delivery or on-demand delivery. Having enough of the workforce is also crucial to handle bulk distribution during the peak season. In short, you must have the capability and adequate resources to handle the sudden rise in demand and improvise their delivery facilities accordingly to cater to the predicted sales.
#4 Communicate More
Your distributors must be ready for rising sales even before the peak season arrives. Maintain proper communication with them and make them aware of your demand forecast so that they too can prepare their storage facility accordingly. Ensuring consistent communication with your local shipping and distribution network will help to prevent any delay in shipping and providing customers with what they need at the right time.
#5 Do Route Planning
It is usually challenging to deal with a large number of orders or couriers with limited resources. Sometimes, even adding up resources does not help. However, it is hard to afford delays in deliveries because customers expect their products to be delivered on time so that they can use or gift during festivities. Using a route optimization tool is consequently essential during peak season sales as it helps in avoiding any inconsistency or delays in delivery. Under optimized route planning, you need to arrange your parcels based on their drop destinations and then allocate fleets and staff for each stop accordingly. You can also hire a local logistic or delivery partner for a particular route if you lack the resources and assign them the responsibility to deliver all parcels in that route.
Final Takeaway!
Amid the Christmas holidays and New Year’s excitement, sales of your business are bound to rise. You may need to appoint additional resources or staff and expand hours to scale up your production. However, investing some more costs on your deliveries to cope with a surge in demand becomes challenging. The only way to deal with seasonal surges is to plan wisely. These aforementioned tips are some of the effective ways to handle bigger volumes of deliveries efficiently. If you are seeking a shipping service in Dallas and Minneapolis to help your business run smoothly during the peak season, then Smart Delivery Service will be your ideal pick. We have a specialized team for handling bulk and on-demand orders and we also offer other courier service-related facilities like safe warehousing logistics and efficient distribution.
