It's safe to assume that express and parcel delivery operators have enjoyed a boost to their volumes over the past week with major e-commerce player Amazon announcing a record-breaking Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping bonanza even though this can't be confirmed with hard data.
Amazon highlighted that sales by small and medium-sized businesses worldwide grew more than 20% on Black Friday year-over-year and that throughout the 'Turkey 5' – the five popular shopping days starting with Thanksgiving and continuing through Cyber Monday – Amazon.com customers ordered more than 180 million items.
US operators, such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), FedEx and UPS tend to view the holiday season as a whole – running from Thanksgiving through to Christmas and even New Year, making it difficult to pinpoint parcel volumes and growth, for Black Friday and Cyber Monday specifically,
Contacted by CEP-Research, FedEx said it expected once again to see a record number of packages through the company’s global network over the 2018 peak holiday shipping season.
“Changing market dynamics related to the growth of e-commerce are expected to once again drive the highest surges in demand on Mondays, and FedEx is expecting the Mondays between Black Friday and Christmas to be the busiest in company history,” a spokesperson said.
“With more than 425,000 dedicated team members, the strength and reach of our global network, and a significant investment in our facilities and fleet, we are well-positioned to meet this record demand and look forward to helping deliver the holidays for our customers around the world”.
Commenting on the UK market in particular, a Europe-based FedEx spokesperson said:
“As in all our markets, in the UK we plan meticulously and well in advance of Black Friday to ensure we’re ready for the busiest time of the year. Staff planning to accommodate higher volumes, changes to shift patterns to ensure we’re processing parcels earlier in the day and greater use of our sorting capabilities at the weekend are just the start. A lot of work also goes into earlier communication with customers to anticipate and confirm volume expectations”.
USPS looks at overall volume for the peak holiday season, running from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, a spokesperson told CEP Research.
The US postal utility expects to deliver nearly 15 billion pieces of mail and 900 million packages during this period.
“The Postal Service is ready to deliver for the holiday season. We have increased our operating capacity to include additional transportation and extended our delivery windows,” said Megan J. Brennan, Postmaster General and CEO. “Our dedicated employees are proud to deliver more packages to homes than any other shipper.”
USPS will again expand its Sunday delivery operations to locations, high package volumes having begun on November 25. It already delivers packages on Sundays in most major cities, and anticipates delivering more than eight million packages on Sundays this December. Mail carriers will also deliver packages on Christmas Day in select locations.
It said that with an increase in early and online shopping for gifts, there is no longer a 'busiest day' for holiday shipping. Instead, USPS' busiest time is now two weeks before Christmas.
Starting the week of December 10, customer traffic is expected to increase, and the US postal utility is bracing itself to deliver nearly 200 million packages per week during these two weeks.
UPS would not be drawn on its Black Friday and Cyber Monday volumes, limiting its comments to the following brief statement:
“UPS plans year-round to ensure that its customers receive convenient, on-time delivery services during the peak season, traditionally the days between Black Friday and New Year’s Eve. UPS shipped nearly 762+ million packages during the peak period in 2017, with an average of 34 million packages per day. UPS expects to deliver almost 37 million packages worldwide on Peak Day in 2018”.
US media reported, quoting data from ShipMatrix, that UPS delivered 98.3% of the packages it shipped during Thanksgiving week on time.
The research firm showed FedEx delivered 98.9% of its packages on time while for USPS the rate was 97.9%.
The report said that this marked an excellent start for all three parcel carriers, although the heaviest part of the delivery season was still come up.
There had been a focus in particular on UPS after logistics issues arose last year amid the e-commerce boom.
It quoted UPS spokesman, Glenn Zaccara, who said of this year's delivery performance:
"UPS is off to a good start this holiday season."
In the UK,British e-commerce association, IMRG reported that £1.49 billion was spent with UK online retailers on Black Friday 2018, which was up 7.3% on the same day last year.
“While the amount spent on UK online retail sites on Black Friday was up, it was substantially below our original forecast of +13.2%”, noted Andy Mulcahy, Strategy and Insight director at IMRG
He said one possible reasons for this was related to payday.
“Black Friday fell on 23 November this year, the earliest it can fall, which means there is still a Friday left in the month. For those who get paid in the last week of the month, Black Friday may have been unfortunately timed. It could mean that Cyber Monday and indeed the full week following it (which some retailers continue to market as ‘Cyber Week’) could feature significant sales activity from that group of shoppers”.
One shipper to detail its Black Friday volumes was one of Europe 's leading online fashion platforms, Zalando.
“At peak times, orders were in excess of 4,200 per minute, breaking last year’s milestone of 2,000. On Black Friday alone, Zalando acquired over 220,000 new customers; more than doubling customer acquisition compared to 2017. The Zalando customer favourite was a pair of black sneakers.
The company said it had concluded one of the most important commercial retail events “with record-breaking results of around two million orders” across its 17 main markets.
