Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone but we are actually right in the middle of the world’s annual shopping frenzy. Retailers and other small businesses who find themselves shipping out countless packages this time of year are quickly turning to third party shipping services to help monitor their parcels and being conservative on their shipping offers. They can’t afford a repeat of last year’s huge miscalculation by UPS and FedEx when they failed to deliver so many of their packages by Christmas.
Cyber Monday’s online sales grew 15% compared to 2013, making this the biggest online shopping day in history according to Custora E-Commerce Pulse, an ecommerce real-time transaction data software service. Black Friday went pitch black with retail giants Toys R Us, BrandsMart, IKEA, CVS and Lowe’s seeing major increases in sales as per data published by G/O Digital. Interestingly enough, purchases from smartphones went up an astonishing 57% from 2013 making Cyber Monday more popular than dealing with rude and sometimes violent Black Friday crowds.
What does this all mean? The phenomenal success of online sales over the Thanksgiving weekend translates into even more packages being shipped out before Christmas adding to the shipping bottleneck. Suchartita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research doubts the shipping industry is prepared for this kind of influx even after last year’s Christmas pandemonium and the hiring of additional temporary employees to help with the demand.
December 15th is the expected busiest day in the year for shipping companies. Although there are still three more weeks left to Christmas, reminders from UPS and FedEx are urging people not to wait until the last minute if they want their packages delivered in time.
These reminders from UPS and FedEx tell us that even they are leery of their own ability to deliver all these packages on time and exactly why monitoring package delivery is critical for those who are sending large numbers of packages. The financial consequences for a small business in today’s economy can be grave if their packages are not delivered as promised and these big shipping companies make it very difficult for businesses to claim their refunds when they aren’t delivered on time.
For a small percentage of the refund, third party shipping companies like Refund Logistics tracks and monitors shipments for businesses in this situation with no upfront costs to the entrepreneurs. Expected delivery delays and learned lessons from last year’s chaos from UPS and FedEx make it also expected that third party shipping services will increase dramatically. Signing up for refund monitoring this holiday season will help save time and money!