Because it falls on the fourth Thursday of November every year instead of a specific date, Thanksgiving can take place as early as November 22. The years when that happens essentially provide an extra week of holiday shopping before Christmas, more than a month later. In 2024, though, Thanksgiving falls on November 28, the latest possible date for the holiday. And that means the shipping industry is preparing for a tightly-packed holiday shipping season.
With little room for error, companies have spent months preparing for the 2024 holiday shipping season. In order to make sure everything runs smoothly, they’re depending on their data.
What the late date could mean for shipments
The shorter time frame is not expected to impact shopping. In its annual holiday retail forecast, Deloitte projects that 2024 holiday retail sales will increase between 2.3% and 3.3%, with sales totaling $1.58 trillion to $1.59 trillion. Stores have their own ways to adjust to the calendar. For one, holiday “creep” means they bring out holiday sales earlier and earlier. But with customers shopping online and thinking about holiday shopping more than just in November and December, the issue isn’t about making the sales…it’s about getting products to customers on time.
The window for Black Friday deliveries is tight, but also consider Cyber Monday doesn’t take place this year until the calendar has already changed to December, and Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday. The challenge will be how quickly businesses and shipping companies can align to make sure customers are happy without paying exorbitant prices.
Data and AI
One of the ways shipping companies will try to meet demand is by raising prices. This doesn’t happen arbitrarily. Companies use data to determine their needs and they use the increased surcharges to cover the extra costs it will take to handle the high demand. UPS, for example, is preparing for “the highest volume ever in our network,” and enacted peak season surcharges as early as late September. The charges remain in effect until mid-January.
The data can also help make sure the shipping companies are operating as efficiently as possible in busy times. Companies track information like driving time between stops, but some go beyond that by scoring drivers on more specific data, some of which depends on the size of the packages they are delivering. Someone dropping off large boxes at an apartment building would take longer at their stop than someone delivering a single envelope, for example. Other more individual metrics include how well a driver met a delivery specification, using the pictures a driver took of a drop-off and using artificial intelligence technology to compare that with the instructions a customer might have given about where to leave a package.
Prohibiting theft
Shipping companies are getting more technology-oriented when it comes to protecting deliveries as well. Some of the same tracking technology that provides the data for companies to track the efficiency of their supply chains can also be used to make sure packages are reaching their intended destination. Smart packaging includes everything from QR codes to RFID to sensors.
Artificial intelligence is also playing an increased role in protecting purchases. UPS’s Delivery Defense is AI software that looks at certain data to determine the likelihood a package will be delivered successfully. Its predictions are based on metrics such as location, loss frequency, returns volume, and delivery attempts. The technology can determine if a shipment is ‘at-risk’, and allows a package to be re-routed to somewhere like a UPS Store for safe pickup, rather than being left on a doorstep.
The busy holiday shipping season is filled with the potential for disruption, and that doesn’t even factor in elements like weather or the threats of work stoppages that put a scare into some companies in recent weeks. The only way to prepare for events that may or may not be predictable is to have an organization that values data and has an analytics solution in place to turn that data into actionable information.
The good news is that, by all accounts, the holiday retail season is returning to more of what we all expected before the pandemic. Because of the pandemic, though, customers are much more aware of what is happening with their products all along the supply chain, especially when it comes to last-mile delivery. Companies need to stay on top of their data to make sure they can meet the high expectations those customers are setting.
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