Each of the four pre-Christmas Mondays in December will be peak delivery days, putting some organisations under strain, according to predictions from ecommerce firm MetaPack.
The busiest day for deliveries this Christmas will be 1 December, with 15 December coming a close second, if the firm’s predictions are right.
The current forecast on Christmas 2014 is it will be the busiest festive season so far, with online order and delivery volumes expected to reach 120 million orders in December alone. However, similarly to the last four years, 2014’s peak shopping season is starting later and, as a result, will peak later.
Angela O’Connell, Marketing and Strategy Director at MetaPack said: “There’s tremendous collaboration among retailers and carriers to widen the choice available to consumers and meet their demands for greater flexibility. In fact, this Christmas consumers will be increasingly embracing innovative options like Sunday service and click and collect, which will play an integral role this Christmas.”
The ecommerce delivery company will create a carrier performance heat map that tracks how the top 10 UK carriers cope with the peak period. This follows similar analysis carried out by MetaPack in September looking at carrier performance, based on bottlenecks and pinchpoints.
