It is now less than three months until Black Friday 2015, which – if the predictions are to be believed – will attract a huge increase in awareness compared with last year, leading to more orders, and therefore more deliveries.
How much more requires guesswork. But some people think sales could hit £1bn on Black Friday. Given that 2014 saw Yodel wrestling with an additional 600,000 parcels – thanks to Black Friday – an increase in sales to the level of £1bn will put a considerable amount of strain on the retail delivery network.
According to research carried out by eDigitalResearch for Yodel back in June, 30% of UK shoppers are likely to want to splash out on something three months to the day from today. That compares with an equivalent of around 8% for Black Friday 2014. Small wonder the UK’s second biggest carrier is planning to set upper limits for the amount of next-day business it will accept from Black Friday.
But even if that pays off for Yodel, it’s not going to save the rest of the industry. So what is?
- Failsafes on your order management / warehouse management systems..?
- A special taskforce of cross-discipline personnel, in the fashion of the UK government’s Cobra Committee..?
- A tin-foil hat and a ‘do not disturb’ sign..?
Write and tell us, give us your thoughts, your fears, your pearls of wisdom… we want to hear from you.
The clock isn’t just ticking in relation to 27 November. We’re now about six weeks away from the first ever eDelivery Conference (EDC2015 – 13 October), and we’ve just unveiled a special invitation for smaller, startup businesses to get involved; we know that events like ours can sometimes feel like they are the preserve of the larger, more well established names. So, as part of our commitment to be truly inclusive, we’re doing something about that.
We’ve also got an interview on the site with Ian Jindal, founder and editor-in-chief of eDelivery and InternetRetailing. In it, Ian talks about the origins of EDC and IRC – InternetRetailing’s conference which takes place the following day – and the changing landscape of the ecommerce sector.
Elsewhere in eDelivery, there’s a bit of game of two halves theme going on. Doddle has opened a new store at London’s Kings Cross, which it claims is going to have 47 million people passing by per year.
Meanwhile, over at another London transport landmark, P2P Mailing is expanding its hub near Heathrow airport to handle 95% of its worldwide delivery volumes.
But over in Holland, Schiphol airport has announced that cargo volumes were lower in the first half of 2o15 than in the corresponding period last year. The slowdown in Asian markets – particularly China (see eDelivery, 26 August) – is responsible, the airport says, as is the uncertainty in Russia.
We’ve already mentioned EDC2015, and tickets are still available. I’m hoping to personally meet and chat to as many eDelivery readers as I possibly can. If that hasn’t put you off attending, you can find an overview of some of the speakers and themes you can look forward to here. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing interviews with some of them and we very much hope to see you there.
And if you haven’t subscribed to eDelivery yet why not..? You’ll get our weekly newsletter summarising the main stories we’ve covered, and we’ll keep you informed of other big announcements, but we won’t spam you – no one’s liked spam since the 1940s. You’ll find details on subscribing here.
You can also join our LinkedIn group for analysis and networking as it happens, or if you want your updates in real-time find us on Twitter @edeliverynet.
Header image: ‘Black Friday 2010, Westlake Seattle’ – Copyright John Henderson.
Image from Flickr, reproduced under creative commons.
