For many brands, peak season means navigating Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day, and the January sales, all while juggling international demand.
On the face of it, it’s enough to strike fear into any business, as a bad peak can be catastrophic (and we don’t use that word lightly).
Get it right, however, and peak becomes your springboard for long-term growth.
With the above in mind, nailing the essentials of peak fulfilment is non-negotiable. Here, we’ll discuss these fundamentals and why they’re vital for your brand to thrive through peak season.
Stockouts are costly whenever they happen, but during peak they can cause even greater damage.
Oversells, cancelled orders, unhappy customers – they’re often the result of poor inventory visibility, and their impacts are heightened when your buyers’ Christmas gifts are on the line.
In 2024, online Black Friday sales in the UK reached £1.12 billion, making it the biggest single online shopping day of the year. Without a single source of truth across DTC and B2B channels, or forecasting and inventory visibility solutions that help you predict and react to demand, brands risk chasing shadows instead of selling with confidence.
So, what’s the solution? Unified inventory systems that provide real-time visibility across all your channels and regions.
With this in place, you’ll be able to allocate stock dynamically, helping you keep promises to customers and retailers.
We touched on this in the previous section, but for good reason. Forecasting demand for peak isn’t a guessing game (or at least it shouldn’t be) – it should be driven by data-led forecasting solutions.
Despite this, many brands still rely on manual spreadsheets (or worse, instinct). The risk? Overstocking and tying up precious capital, or understocking and losing sales to competitors.
Last year’s demand might not necessarily reflect the demand your business is set to face this peak, so the more dynamic (and data-rich) your forecasting solutions, the better.
Smarter forecasting tools combine historical sales data, live channel performance, and external factors like promotions or social trends to accurately predict demand. By implementing these solutions, you’ll turn forecasting into a proactive tool, aligning inventory with marketing and fulfilment capacity.
Manual workflows that hold up throughout the year won’t necessarily scale with your brand’s peak season performance.
A lot of businesses turn to hiring temps and scaling labour during the peak season, but it’s not always the best (or smartest) option.
This is where automation becomes essential. From barcode scanning to dynamic picking routes, automation safeguards accuracy from manual errors and scales output without adding headcount.
For brands, this means faster fulfilment, fewer errors, and a more consistent service throughout the highest-stakes trading period of the year.
Relying on a single carrier is risky in any market. Strikes, bottlenecks, and any other number of complications can cause delivery delays for your parcels.
When customer expectations are at their highest, your business can’t afford the risk of putting all your eggs in one carrier-shaped basket.
Because of this, carrier diversity is vital for resilience. Smart platforms allow you to allocate orders to the best courier for each delivery based on cost, speed, or geography, ensuring customer promises are met when other networks are under pressure.
In practice, this isn’t just insurance, but a way to actively reduce costs and improve delivery performance at scale.
Returns aren’t just inevitable, they’re expected. They should be treated with as much regard as deliveries in your peak fulfilment strategy, helping you maintain customer trust and loyalty during the busiest periods.
When handled badly, returns are expensive for your business and frustrating for your customers, and often leads buyers to shop elsewhere next time they purchase – 40% of them, in fact.
So, what do good returns look like? In-country returns hubs and tech-enabled workflows mean customers can return items locally (and quickly), helping you process refunds and rework items much faster.
In reality, the best brands don’t see returns as a hindrance, but a competitive advantage: firstly to retrieve and resell products quickly, secondly to ensure the customer experience doesn’t end at the point of delivery.
Peak season is where partnerships are truly tested. Many businesses still see fulfilment as a transactional relationship, but peak is where you’ll discover whether your provider is simply a vendor or a strategic ally.
While consumers expect fast, reliable delivery, strict retailer compliance also comes into play for those servicing B2B channels. Managing DTC and B2B side-by-side when the orders ramp up requires strong collaboration and trust.
For a successful peak season, it’s essential to have a strong relationship with your fulfilment provider – think brand builder, not just box mover.
If your fulfilment partner doesn’t align and advise on strategies, solve problems proactively, or help you protect customer promises under pressure, it might be time to consider a switch.
Even if you have your processes in order, the wrong partner can still hold you back. Warning signs appear in the form of inconsistent communication, poor visibility (into data and processes), or a reliance on reactive firefighting when volumes increase.
To put it simply: if you spend more time chasing updates than planning for business growth, that’s a problem.
Of course, switching providers isn’t a decision to take lightly. But even switching close to (or even during) peak doesn’t have to be disruptive, especially if your newfound partner has done it before.
If you’re currently considering a change, ask yourself:
For many growing brands, the run-up to peak season is when these questions matter most.
Peak season doesn’t need to be stressful, but it does need the right foundations. If your current fulfilment setup leaves you second-guessing stock, scrambling for carriers or worrying about compliance, it’s time to consider a change.
By partnering with a provider that offers resilient peak season logistics, you can approach the busiest time of year with confidence – not caution.