Getting through peak season in eCommerce is one thing. Doing it successfully is another.
When it comes to peak in eCommerce, a lot of success comes down to planning early, understanding exactly where demand will come from, and ensuring marketing, inventory, customer experience, and fulfillment are ready to scale when orders increase.
For many US eCommerce brands, this means preparing for the busy run through Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. For others, peak can happen at an entirely different time of year.
But whatever creates your brand's peak, the challenge stays the same: making the most of increased demand without putting the rest of the business under unnecessary pressure.
Let's dive into some tips to help you do exactly that.
First, a definition: peak season in eCommerce refers to the period when online retailers experience significantly higher traffic and order volumes than usual.
For many US brands, the main peak season falls during Q4, particularly around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.
Driven by key dates in the retail calendar and heavy discounting, peak season adds extra pressure to a brand's logistics operation due to unusually high sales volumes. The important thing is knowing when your demand is likely to increase and making sure your brand is prepared before it does.
Peak season can be unpredictable, but that doesn't mean you can't prepare for it.
The brands that handle peak well have already done enough preparation beforehand to know what they're expecting, and what they'll do if things don't quite go to plan.
Here's where to start.
If your peak starts in November, your planning shouldn't.
The best place to begin is looking back at what happened during your previous peak.
It's important to look beyond the sales figures, too. A record-breaking Black Friday might look great from a revenue perspective, but if deliveries were late and it created hundreds of customer service tickets, there's still a lot to be learned.
The earlier these conversations happen, the more options you have, and the better your contingency planning will be.
By the time peak arrives, you should be focusing on actioning your plan, not creating it.
Unless your data backs it up, there's no real need to throw a promotion at every date on the retail calendar.
You just need to know when your customers are most likely to buy.
For the majority of US eCommerce brands, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge. For others, back-to-school, Halloween, Prime Day or the weeks leading up to Christmas could be more important.
Some brands will have peaks that have very little to do with the traditional retail calendar.
If you sell outdoor products, for example, your peaks will more likely come in the spring and summer months. If you sell fitness products, January could be particularly strong. A successful product launch could also create more interest than any national shopping event.
The point here is to focus on your own sales data rather than what the retail calendar tells you.
Without care, peak season can quickly turn into a race to see who can put the biggest percentage sign on a homepage banner.
And even though discounts are proven to drive more demand, more orders don't necessarily mean more profitable orders.
Before deciding what you're going to promote, understand what you're wanting to achieve. It could be:
Once you've decided, you've got a better base for your peak season plan.
Then, think: do we want to increase basket size with bundles? Can we give loyal customers early access? Should we add free shipping thresholds to encourage customers to buy another product?
The most important thing is, if you do discount, make sure the rest of the business knows what's coming.
If marketing plans to push a particular product heavily on Black Friday, your operations teams need to know about it.
Peak is arguably the worst time to make customers work hard to give you their money.
Competition is high, and, for many customers, this will be the first experience they have with your brand.
You don't need to redesign your entire eCommerce store before Black Friday, but you do need to ensure buying from you is easy.
You've already done the difficult part by getting users to your website — even more so if they've got a product in their basket.
Don't make completing their purchase the most frustrating part of the experience.
Believe it or not, not every peak season order has to arrive tomorrow. The important thing is making your customers aware of when it is going to arrive.
A lot of peak season frustration comes from the gap between what a customer thought was going to happen and what actually happened.
Before a customer places an order, be clear about shipping costs, expected delivery times, holiday cut-offs, and your returns policy.
It's equally important to keep them informed after they buy.
Send out an order confirmation promptly, provide tracking when it's available, make delivery updates easy to access, and, if something goes wrong, tell the customer before they discover it themselves.
As Christmas approaches, it's really important to be proactive with the information customers receive.
An order placed in early November and an order placed a few days before Christmas don't carry the same urgency. If an order won't arrive in time for Christmas, say so — don't wait until the customer checks out.
Good communication isn't the solution to every peak season problem, but it does stop manageable issues becoming an angry customer's support ticket.
You can have the best marketing campaign, the perfect website, and an irresistible offer — but none of it matters if your product is out of stock.
Peak season inventory planning is tough, and there's no such thing as a perfect forecast.
Historical sales data can help, but forecasting is about much more than taking last year's numbers and adding a percentage on top.
Think about what's changed:
You also don't want to forecast on total order volume alone — doing so can see you end up with plenty of inventory overall and still stock out of the three SKUs everybody wants.
Look at performance at a SKU level, as well as product trends, planned promotions, and previous buying behavior to work out where demand is likely to concentrate.
Then it's about getting inventory where it needs to be early enough.
Stock has to be received, checked, stored, and made available for sale before it can be fulfilled. Leave it too late, and your peak could get off to the worst possible start.
For brands selling across the US (or even further afield), where inventory is positioned can make a huge difference, too.
Holding products closer to customer demand can reduce how far parcels need to travel, opening up more efficient delivery options.
Having enough stock isn't the same as having enough fulfillment capacity — a very important distinction during peak.
Your warehouse might contain enough inventory to cover every order, but can it physically pick, pack, and dispatch those orders quickly enough?
Base your expectations on your busiest day rather than your average one.
Every fulfillment operation has a limit somewhere. Your job is to ensure your peak season requirements fall well within those limits.
The job's not done when your order leaves the warehouse. It still needs to reach the customer.
During peak season, carrier networks deal with the same increase in demand as everyone else, meaning flexibility is often the key behind staying consistent.
Different carriers and services have different strengths depending on the destination, parcel, delivery speed, and capacity available.
If your brand has access to multiple options, you'll have more room to adapt rather than forcing every order through the same service no matter what.
It can also provide you with much-needed resilience if a particular carrier experiences disruption or capacity becomes constrained.
If your preferred shipping option becomes unavailable or unsuitable during peak, you should already know what the alternative is.
Your forecast only tells you what you think is going to happen.
When peak gets going, real-time data tells you what's actually happening.
You don't need hundreds of reports or a dashboard that looks like mission control to get a good sense of what's going on. You just need enough visibility to answer a few questions quickly:
If your latest campaign works well and a particular SKU starts selling twice as quickly as expected, knowing right away gives you options.
Returns should be a key part of your peak season planning, not just something you have to deal with after peak ends.
If you sell significantly more stock throughout November and December, some of it will come back in December and January.
So, do your customers a favor by making it easy to understand and straightforward to do. It could be the difference between them buying from you again or going elsewhere.
It's important to make your policy clear before the purchase happens, and explain exactly how a customer can initiate a return and how long they have to do so.
Any questions answered ahead of the purchase makes it easier if they change their mind or order the wrong size.
Behind the scenes, you need a returns plan.
A good returns operation will move suitable products back into circulation quickly while giving customers a positive post-purchase experience.
Truth is, it rarely goes exactly to plan.
But your job isn't to predict the future. It's to notice problems early and have the flexibility in place to respond.
If demand is significantly higher than forecast, work out where the pressure is building first. That might mean prioritizing inventory, increasing your fulfillment capacity, or adjusting promotional activity before the operation becomes overwhelmed.
If a product is selling out, make sure availability is reflected accurately across your sales channels. Don't commit advertising spend towards sending customers to an unavailable product, and be realistic about restock dates.
If deliveries are delayed, communicate proactively. Give customers access to useful tracking information and tell them what's happening rather than forcing them into chasing you for answers.
This is where effective contingency planning earns its keep. You might never need that plan B, but it's important to have it.
Preparing for peak season isn't easy, and the more your brand grows, the more moving parts there are to consider.
You need to forecast demand, get inventory into position, make sure there's enough fulfillment capacity, manage shipping, monitor orders, prepare for returns, and more. It's a lot to take on.
This is precisely where the right third-party logistics provider can make a huge difference.
The value of a 3PL during peak season goes deeper than your brand being able to handle more orders. It means you won't have to build, manage, and constantly adjust the operation to handle exactly what you need when you're at your busiest.
Many modern fulfillment providers also offer technology to take the pressure off your brand during peak.
This tech can range from real-time inventory tools that boost your visibility to forecasting software to keep you ahead of demand.
Add to that the extra room to scale, the right fulfillment partner can unlock many of the doors holding brands back from hitting their peak season potential.
With its in-house platform, 17 global warehouse locations, and three US fulfillment centers, fulfilmentcrowd brings calm to the peak season for over 250 brands worldwide.
Bringing every sales channel and region into one real-time view, fulfilmentcrowd's technology gives brands much-needed room to breathe during the busiest time of year.
So, no matter how much your brand grows (or where it sells), you'll always manage everything in one place.