Planning to do holiday shopping online? Prepare for major shipping delays, experts say

Halloween is barely in the rearview, but experts say it’s time to start thinking about holiday shopping.

Why? They’re expecting unprecedented shipping delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Online shopping has surged during the pandemic, and the holidays aren’t expected to be any different. Salesforce and Deloitte each predict online shopping sales during the holiday season to surge 35% higher than last year, KGO reported.

This is expected to put significant strain on the shipping industry, causing major delays — a prediction coined “shipageddon,” by Scot Wingo, founder and executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor.

Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Communications, said e-commerce is growing faster than carriers are adding shipping capacity, leading to a “significant comeuppance because none of the carriers are going to be able to flex to have the capacity to fill all the extra e-commerce orders,” he said on the Jason and Scot Show - a retail and e-commerce podcast.

Many retailers are concerned that shipping carriers will put caps on how many daily deliveries they’ll make during the holiday season’s peak, NBC reported.

FedEx chief marketing officer Brie Carere told CNN that shipping volumes have been consistent with peak Christmas and Cyber Monday levels every day since March.

“Now we’re headed into a peak on top of a peak. We expect there will be limits to capacity on certain days this season,” she said, according to the outlet.

Carere told NBC she plans to get all her holiday shopping done by Nov. 1.

FedEx and UPS are each adding tens-of thousands of seasonal workers to keep up with demand — 70,000 and 100,000, respectively — and both said they’re adapting to their customers’ behaviors, according to NBC.

“Strategies for working with our largest customers during this time include helping shift package volume away from the heaviest demand shipping days, to fully utilizing weekend capacity, and aligning promotional strategies with capacity,” a UPS spokesperson told the outlet.

In Colorado, the U.S. Postal Service has rented two new warehouses totaling 300,000 square feet to handle the influx of packages.

Some retailers are reducing their reliance on traditional shipping carriers, utilizing companies such as Instacart and Shipt to deliver items from local stores, the New York Times reported.

When to shop

Experts say that consumers should start online shopping earlier to account for delays.

“There’s no way the parcel carriers are equipped to handle it,” Hannah Testani, chief operating officer of analytics company Intelligent Audit, told CNN.

She recommended buying gifts online no later than December 1 to ensure packages arrive on time, according to the outlet. Others, however, said that’s not necessary.

“I would say December 18, the Friday the before Christmas, should be safe in most cases,” Satish Jindel, president of software provider ShipMatrix, told CNN. “That’s moved up by at least two or three days from last year.”

Another reason to shop early? Dramatic last-minute price cuts are unlikely this year, The New York Times reported.

The pandemic frustrated retailers’ inventory plans and many have less merchandise in stock, according to the newspaper. Retailers are unlikely to offer deep discounts on items already tough to come by.

Retailers such as Walmart and Target are also doing away with their traditional Black Friday one-day deal frenzies, opting instead to stretch Black Friday-style discounts throughout the months of November and December.

This story was originally published November 1, 2020 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Planning to do holiday shopping online? Prepare for major shipping delays, experts say."