The Thanksgiving Rush
Thanksgiving kicks off the busy holiday shopping season, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday shortly following. This leads to a massive spike in ecommerce orders and shipping volumes, and with so many packages flooding delivery networks all at once, delays are common.
However, with some strategic planning and partnering with a freight forwarding company like Blacksmith Freight, we can help your business navigate the holiday peak unscathed.
Avoid shipping delays during Thanksgiving
Here are six practical steps to help prepare your supply chain in time for Thanksgiving.
- Get a Head Start
Ramp up inventory orders to suppliers in October. This gives extra time for manufacturing and transport before volumes spike. Building up safety stock means you can fulfil more November and December orders from existing inventory, rather than waiting on delayed holiday arrivals.
- Optimise Warehouse Workflows Now
Analyse warehouse operations and staffing to identify any bottlenecks. Add pickers and packers, if needed, to handle the influx of orders. Implement barcoding, inventory management software, and efficient slotting to speed up fulfilment processes.
- Prep for Surge Returns
Some holiday purchases can result in returns. To help manage this, work with your 3PL company to swiftly inspect, process, and reshelve returned inventory. The quicker that items are back in stock, the more sales you can recapture.
- Get Time-Sensitive Items Moving
Flag any time-critical inventory that must arrive by Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Ship these goods via air or expedited services at least 1-2 weeks pre-holiday to avoid delays.
Thanksgiving shipping delays are inevitable, but preparation minimises their impact. Optimise warehousing, contracts, redundancies, returns, and analytics now before the holiday crunch begins.
- Proactive Delay Monitoring
Freight Forwarders can actively track shipments to quickly identify any potential delays. They then communicate with carriers to find solutions, whether that’s expediting clearance procedures, switching vessels, or chartering extra flights.
- Brokerage Expertise
Blacksmith Freight has extensive experience managing customs clearance, allowing us to expertly navigate any international red tape and ensure that all customs paperwork is correct to avoid any further delays to your shipment.
How a logistics company can help
Blacksmith Freight are logistics experts who arrange end-to-end transportation for all shipments. We contract with carriers, consolidate shipments, track goods, and handle customs clearance. This simplifies the shipping process while providing greater flexibility and reliability. Using an experienced freight forwarder during peak shopping season can avoid delays during the rush.
At Blacksmith Freight, we work with a wide range of carriers across air, ocean, rail, and road transport. This diversified network makes it easier to secure cargo space and reroute shipments as needed to avoid bottlenecks. If one carrier is overloaded, a forwarder can switch a shipment to another partner to prevent delays.
Contact us today for a no obligation, personalised quote to fit with your freight forwarding needs.