Kriti
What causes companies to fail during the busiest sales season of the year is not apparent at the cash register; rather, it is in the storage facility three weeks before. The successful brands during Black Friday and Cyber Monday are not the ones with the most extensive warehouses. They are the ones that have established the most productive systems well before sales increase.
How to Handle E-commerce Peak Season Surges Without Breaking Your Supply Chain
Whether you are running grocery stores, bakeries, or electronics shops. You should always be ready with a supply chain for peak season.
Forecast With Intent, Not With Spreadsheets
Many merchants default to a safety stock cushion by looking at last year’s dates and adding something on top. That’s a good starting point, but unless you are then refining with what you know to be true about your business over the planned trading period- performance marketing activity, email campaigns, influencer marketing, recent PR, the weather, whatever external factors affect sales of that SKU- it is not a strategy.
When you have done the tough pre-season work, during the season accurate safety stock is organic. If you have ordered effectively up front, fewer surprises should come your way when the game is live. Your safety stock, therefore, is by SKU (assuming you have ordered to your DC with sense) and is generated by the likely units you expect to sell minus the lead time for the next order.
This is all built on a foundation of good forecasting. The better your forecast, granted with some comfortable lead time, the safer your safety stock. More accurate and granular forecasts (a monthly view per SKU v. the same aggregated for a batch) mean more informed orders.
This approach means your reorder points won’t just stop you from running out of stock; they will also make you smarter on pricing (you know what products you really can’t run out of, especially when there’s new demand you can measure up ahead of it) and storage cost (because you have fewer or no overstocking items).
Position Inventory Closer to Your Customers
Nothing you do in your warehouse can fully compensate for thousands of extra kilometres in transit while carriers are at peak load.
Shipping from local or regional FCs, instead of one location, exposes you to less last-mile risk; parcels travel shorter distances so there are fewer handoffs; dimensional weight hits on bulky, lightweight goods are lower; and most non-expedited orders will arrive in your service region the next day. Ensure the best transit times and lowest costs nationally during your peak using somebody else’s infrastructure.
For Australian suppliers, that’s especially applicable. Shipping from a central warehouse to metro customers on the eastern seaboard during peak season means competing for capacity on the busiest corridors in the network. The most direct solution is to keep your stock where your orders are and leverage SKUTOPIA’s Sydney 3PL solutions to manage rapid turnarounds to Australia’s largest consumer market over peak, without building or leasing permanent infrastructure to do it.
Rethink Your Warehouse Floor Before You Need to
As your order volume doubles, your warehouse’s physical layout can either be a bottleneck or a big advantage. The bin locations that made perfect sense when it was quiet won’t stand up when the pressure is on.
Reorganize your floor so that high-velocity SKUs are as close to the packing stations as possible. The ultimate aim is to reduce travel time per pick. Implement batch picking, where a single picker picks items for multiple orders in one run, and you multiply those time savings by thousands of orders per day.
Your warehouse management system should be facilitating this. If your WMS is not optimizing pick paths or highlighting inventory positioning problems, that’s something to look at before BFCM, rather than during it.
Build Redundancy Into Your Carrier Network
Relying on a single carrier is a risk that can lead to your SLA commitments falling short. When one carrier network reaches full capacity, which, if you are reading this, you know will happen during high season, every order you have pushed through that one channel is at the mercy of that carrier’s performance during a heavily congested time.
Multi-carrier shipping software utilizes your business rules to determine which carrier gets used to deliver each package. We are constantly amazed at how few businesses are aware of the capabilities this kind of software offers, of the logic operating behind the scenes of the shipments, even fulfillment employees who are operating the WMS that the software integrates with. But it is not magic; it is simply logic based on parameters.
If it is going to a regional area, Carrier A might be the default. If it is going to the city, Carrier B is the best default choice. If you’ve programmed the WMS that your software can talk to, routing logic like the above can take care of the dynamic carrier selection for you.
Plan Your Returns Pipeline Before Returns Arrive
Many brands concentrate on outbound volume during the peak season and don’t worry about returns until January hits, and they don’t have a system in place to handle them.
Return volume is often at its highest in the days and weeks following Black Friday and other major shopping days. If you don’t already have a dedicated returns station and an automated inspection-to-restock process in place, that backlog will accumulate quickly. It slows refunds, ties up working capital in uninspected inventory, and creates a second customer service issue on top of your shipping backlog.
73% of consumers say a poor delivery experience makes them unlikely to shop with that retailer again (Pitney Bowes). Returns handling is part of that experience. A slow refund or a returns process that requires customers to follow up multiple times has the same retention impact as a missed delivery.
The Shift Worth Making
Being prepared for the peak season does not depend on how large you are, but on how adaptable you can be. Improved predictions, more intelligent organization of your warehouse, additional carriers, automated returns, and regional availability are all areas on which you can focus before the demand appears. It is not that successful brands lack the necessary resources; they just do not prepare for them. If you improve the process, the quantities will be easier to handle.
