E-tailers Facing Festive Delivery ‘Timebomb’

[Parcelhub]

Last year saw courier firms hitting the headlines as higher-than-expected parcel volumes resulted in suspended services and missed deadlines. Shoppers spent £810 million on Black Friday; a 38% increase in online spending which generated 10 million parcels for the domestic delivery network to process. A further £1.2 billion was spent on Cyber Monday three days later and Manic Monday the following week.

Managing Director of Parcelhub, Mark Rosenberg, says although Christmas is definitely being discussed within the industry, too few sellers are thinking properly about their options – complacency which will almost certainly result in issues with delivery capacity later in the year - Read More

 

[roydmoorian]

And no mention of the fact that some 40% of last year's B to C was handled by the now defunct CityLink or that Amazon now has it's own distribution network, however the Amazon system appears to have very little spare capacity even at the moment with deliveries being made up to 21:00 on a Sunday evening....

When delivery networks run on a 5 1/2 day system there is scope to catch up in that (spare) 36 hour period. When the newtwork is already running 7 days a week there is little slack to be made up.