For most retailers in discretionary retail categories, November-December has become the annual peak trading season, bookended by ‘Black November’ – the expanded Black Friday-Cyber Monday online sales season – and post-Christmas Boxing Day sales.
In those two months, every inefficiency in an online retailer’s routines around stock receipts, inventory placement, and carrier coordination becomes more acute. A newly released report from Shiperoo and Inside Retail concludes that many retailers leave it too late to plan for the peak season.
Nish Wijemanne, CEO of Shiperoo, says the time to start planning is in April and May – not one or two months out from November.
“A retailer who engaged with us in July had a four to five-month runway where we had time to work closely on their inbound flow, pre-positioned inventory, and stress-tested peak scenarios,” he told Inside Retail. “It achieved 99.7 per cent dispatch accuracy and same-day volume through peak.”
Another retailer who approached Shiperoo in October had a limited time to provide clear visibility. “We stabilised the operation, but they still experienced 10 to 15 per cent slower dispatch times during peak weeks.”
E-commerce sales in the two weeks before Black Friday rose by 45 per cent year on year in 2024. That scale represents a significant challenge for any retailer who is unprepared, especially when one considers how consumers expect brands to perform in terms of delivery speed and be confident that stock is in a retailer’s inventory when they lodge their orders.
On-time, speedy fulfilment shapes conversion, margin and customer retention, the report says. If you delay planning until the final quarter, your options narrow and the risk of underperforming rises.
Partnership decisions, network design and integration planning should be locked in by May, the report concludes, with testing and simulations running through winter.
Five practical priorities
The timing of planning is the first of five practical priorities highlighted in the report, which offers a roadmap for retailers to optimise their fulfilment capabilities – not just during peak season, but all year round.
Shiperoo’s CXO Rizan Mawzoon advocates that retailers think beyond their 3PL contracts and focus on the quality of the partnership.
Shared forecasts, aligned promotional planning and contingency planning may sound basic, but under pressure, they become strategic. The report concludes that strong peak performance is often driven by trust, visibility and the speed of decision-making, rather than by process.
“By November, the relationship needs to feel like one team. Shared data and forecasting, aligned decision-making and planning, no surprises in inventory, promotions, or demand. Peak success is less about process, more about alignment and trust under pressure,” said Ravi Nath, Shiperoo CTO.
That emphasis on partnership runs through the report, particularly in how retailers assess providers. It suggests looking beyond service claims and asking harder questions about accountability, data access and how performance is managed when conditions deteriorate.
The third conclusion is that fulfilment networks must be designed to become a competitive advantage rather than just an operational detail.
For example, multi-site fulfilment can offer significant advantages for retailers seeking to reduce freight costs and speed delivery. Retailers should consider whether traditional single-site warehousing and distribution models still serve the demands being placed on them.
Furthermore, intelligent order routing is beginning to play a greater role in delivery timeliness, accuracy and efficiency.
“Retailers typically expect simple postcode routing. What surprises them is how dynamic and intelligent it becomes in real time: state-based allocation, carrier performance, cost optimisation. It is not just faster, it is collaborative optimisation,” said Mawzoon.
Visibility has become a key means of monitoring fulfilment performance and customer satisfaction, which, in turn, feeds into a positive customer experience and, thus, brand loyalty.
Periodic reporting may have been sufficient when fulfilment was largely about monitoring service levels. The report argues that the approach of periodic reporting – that may have been sufficient when fulfilment was largely about monitoring service levels – is increasingly outdated. That is never more so than during the peak sales period, a time when decisions often need to be made within hours, not days.
Here, real-time operational visibility emerges as a strong theme of the report.
“Visibility does not replace judgment, but it allows us to make impactful decisions more quickly. Data informs us; our people decide and execute,” said Nath.
For retail executives, the broader message is that better visibility improves commercial decisions, from carrier allocation to freight spend and customer outcomes.
The fifth, and perhaps most timely, conclusion of the report is that carrier resilience should now be treated as part of a retailer’s core infrastructure.
Depending on a single shipping partner carries greater risk than many retailers realise. Multi-carrier strategies, supported by live reallocation capability, represent more than just smart contingency planning; they should be embraced as part of the retailer’s primary operating model.
As volumes build and retailers face increasing pressure, the advantages of such an approach become clear, especially in the last mile.
“We have had carriers underperform during peak. With our systems, we pivot in real time and reallocate volumes. Managed in partnership, the cost impact is minimal compared to the disruption avoided,” said Wijemanne.
A deep dive into successful logistics strategies and partnerships
While those five themes form the backbone of the report, they are only part of it. Behind them is a look at where the deeper value lies in e-commerce fulfilment: the hidden costs of self-managed fulfilment, the risks in poorly tested integrations, the growing importance of upstream data discipline, and the operational signals that can reveal whether a 3PL will perform under peak pressure.
For retail leaders weighing their fulfilment strategy over the coming months, the key question is whether their current fulfilment model is competitive under the conditions created by the seasonal peak.
The full report goes deeper into the decisions, benchmarks and operational frameworks shaping that answer.
