UK consumers are being advised to shop online early to help avoid a repeat of last year’s Christmasdelivery misery when parcel deliveries were hit by a dramatic ‘big freeze’.
Blizzard conditions across the UK and northern Europe last December badly hampered courier,express and postal operators attempting to deliver record volumes of online orders. As a result,several million parcels failed to arrive in time, with the backlog only being completely cleared byNew Year’s Day.
UK parcel and carrier manager, Global Freight Solutions (GFS), has reported delivery firmsspending several months putting measures in place designed to avert similar difficulties. However,GFS director Simon Veale has warned consumers that the only way of making sure parcels are not heldup is by doing their online shopping earlier than normal.
“People might find it a little unseasonal to be thinking about Christmas shopping so earlybut one lesson that everyone in the parcel industry learned last year was the need to be prepared.Everyone hopes that we’re not going to experience the severity of the weather we saw last Decemberbut no-one, retailers, consumers, carriers or even the Met Office, can be sure.
“Carriers have adopted contingency plans with even heavy snow in mind, but the uncertaintyabout both the weather and the numbers of items which may need to be moved means shopping early isthe simplest and most effective course of action,” he said. Veale was speaking as retailers beganoperations to stock up ahead of the expected pre-Christmas sales rush.
UPS this week revealed it expected this year’s Christmas peak week would be 6 per cent biggerthan last year across its global operations, continuing the recent trend of people delaying onlineshopping until just before Christmas. The company pointed out that before the explosion ofe-commerce, the holiday peak season stretched from late November to Christmas, but has now beencompressed largely to the last two weeks before Christmas. UPS said that early indications point toa solid holiday shopping and shipping season this year, and that it was hiring 55,000 seasonalemployees across the US ready for the spike in demand.
Detailed analysis by GFS of last year’s parcel traffic showed how the effects of two episodesof historically heavy snow at the end of November and in mid-December were compounded by moreconsumers choosing to shop online rather than on frozen high streets. At one point, GFS discovered,there was a build up of more than four million parcels which carriers were unable to deliver, muchof it generated by the £6.8 billion of internet purchases in the UK in December alone.
Veale said that a number of carriers had put in place a range of contingencies which theybelieved would make them more able to cope if similar conditions occurred this year. He added thatGFS, which handles millions of parcels each year on behalf of major names in retail, leisure,financial services and engineering, would also be providing clients with advice based on regionallong-range weather forecasts in a further effort to avoid deliveries getting held up by inclementconditions.
“Carriers have been making strenuous efforts to determine how best to provide as full aparcel coverage in the run-up to Christmas as they can,” said Veale. “Those sorts of changes,though, are needed to cope with further shifts both in the volume of online shopping and thetechnology with which consumers buy, as mobile devices make their first telling contribution to thefestive market.
“However, what’s important is not just how people are shopping or even what they’re buying,but when. The ability of carriers to deliver parcels on time is dependent on their being able toprocess huge numbers of orders in the crucial last weeks before Christmas.
“If much of the expected increase in internet sales only happens during that period, greatstrain will once again be placed on the delivery network and if further bad weather strikes, thereis a risk of parcels not arriving when they should. Shopping late means leaving things entirely tochance,” he concluded.
