Online ecommerce shopping

07/22/2024

Delight Customers with Peak Season eCommerce Logistics

Learn how to transform your peak-season supply chain, help your eCommerce business to stand out, and delight your customers.

The combination of rising customer demands and significantly increased shopping activity during peak season creates unique challenges for eCommerce and traditional retailers. The retail marketplace is changing too, with an accelerated shift towards eCommerce and an increased focus on omnichannel.

 

Against this background, retailers must provide extensive product choices, high availability, low prices, fast delivery, and easy returns. This can be difficult at the best of times, but as peak season increases the pressure, those requirements become even more important.

 

For those who can rise to the challenge and delight their customers, the rewards can be significant. Moving from a purely “transactional” relationship to a personalized, multichannel one is rapidly becoming a major competitive differentiator. 

 

Even the peak season itself is changing: eCommerce and 24x7 availability and distribution are altering shopping patterns, and holiday spending continues to break records, year over year. Peak season isn’t just set by consumers anymore. Shifts can be driven through clever integrated marketing, or initiatives like Amazon Prime Day. It’s a dizzying array of factors that need to come together perfectly and meet ever-increasing customer demands.

 

Supporting all of this—supply, demand, capacity, omnichannel—is your logistics. Third-party logistics providers (3PLs) have an outsized impact on customer experience. Finding a trusted 3PL partner that can meet your needs is more critical than ever.

 

In this guide we explore all of these topics, including:

 

  • Why it’s vital to delight customers, and the main ways to do so.
  • The impact of customer delight and strong logistics on your bottom line.
  • Reacting to the ongoing challenges of peak season—supply and demand management.
  • Tackling new demands and horizons—including changing consumer needs and the rise of omnichannel.
  • How logistics in your supply chain lets you meet peak season challenges.
  • How the right 3PL partner services map directly onto delighting your customers.

 

We hope you find it interesting.

Key takeaways

 

  • Customer demand for the fast and easy receipt and return of goods has never been higher. 
  • Shopping is moving beyond being purely transactional, to creating relationships based on customer experiences.
  • Key factors for delighting customers during peak periods are: choice, range, availability, speed of delivery, price, ease of returns, and seamless shopping across multiple channels.
  • Consumers are looking for greater flexibility, convenience, and connection between their digital and real-world experience of retail brands.
  • Consumers want to buy products on their own terms, across multiple channels, in a fast, friction-free, and convenient environment.
  • 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
  • A logistics provider makes a massive contribution to customer delight, experience, and your bottom line. 
  • The speed, flexibility, cost, and quality of your logistics operations directly benefit every other part of your value chain.
  • Each of the benefits, features, and functions provided by a 3PL partner has a direct, positive influence on the customer journey.
  • Personalization, supported by data and analytics, is one of your most powerful tools to strengthen customer connections and win loyalty.
Online ecommerce shopping

Why delighting your peak season customers matters

Customer demand for the fast and easy receipt and return of goods has never been higher. A combination of “The Amazon Prime Effect,” the extremely rapid growth in eCommerce, and changing customer expectations has increased pressure on manufacturers, retailers, and logistics businesses. Meeting customer requirements is vital, and surpassing those expectations helps you stand out in a crowded, competitive marketplace.

 

It used to be that primarily focusing on price was enough to get and keep customers. That’s no longer the case. While the price remains important, the overall customer experience is becoming even more of a differentiator. Customers want to build connections with brands they trust, so buying online is moving beyond being purely transactional, to creating relationships based on their experiences.

 

 

Key factors for delighting your retail customers during peak periods

Choice, availability, and speed are important to customers all year round, but the pressures introduced during peak season put these factors front and center. You need to optimize your supply chain and logistics operations to meet these increased needs:

 

  • Choice and range: During peak times, customers often shop for multiple people and expect to find exactly what they want quickly. You need to manage a range of SKU variants on your products and balance inventory against expected demand.
  • Availability: If customers can’t find what they want from you right now, they will quickly move on to a competitor. Optimizing suppliers, manufacturers, and logistics will reduce lead times for restocking, ensuring goods are there when needed.
  • Speed of delivery: Customers want to order and receive their peak-time products extremely quickly—on the same day or within the next 24 to 48 hours. This means storing stock close to major transport routes to minimize shipping times.
  • Prices: Low prices are a primary customer driver, so minimizing your per-item and fixed costs throughout the supply chain is critical to maximizing profit margins in an increasingly difficult environment. This is especially true for the rapid turnover of products during peak season.
  • Returns: Many of the products customers buy during peak periods are intended as gifts. Some of these gifts will be unwanted, so customers will seek out sellers with easy and reasonable return policies. Your reverse logistics operations must be as robust as your standard ones.

 

It’s easy to underestimate the impact that returns will have, as research shows that up to four-in-ten shoppers buy variations on an item with a return plan in mind. 

 

The customer experience has a significant impact on your bottom line

Retailers operate under thin profit margins. With 80 percent of customers saying the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, the customer journey is central to profitability. Retailers can take advantage in several ways: 

 

  • Build loyalty with customers, encouraging them to become repeat buyers and lowering your customer acquisition costs.
  • Focus marketing on cross-selling and upselling products, resulting in lower promotional spending for better results.
  • Incentivize customer advocates to spread positive messages and recommendations about your brand, for enhanced word-of-mouth advertising.
  • Support omnichannel sales, allowing for greater differentiation through seamlessly selling to customers, wherever they are.
Shopping in store

Logistics helps you demonstrate customer value during peak season

A prospective customer is not thinking about price, availability, choice, and speed of delivery as distinct and separate things. They’re all combined as part of the customer journey—everything you get right increases your perceived value and their likelihood to buy from you. 

 

Because all of these factors rely on products being where you need them, when you need them, your logistics provider makes a massive contribution to customer delight, and your bottom line. 

Don't let logistics hold you back. Get in touch with GEODIS now and discover how our cutting-edge warehousing services can propel your eCommerce growth.  

Button Contact us

The planned-for challenges of peak season

Supply chain managers have long understood the central challenge of peak season—balancing demand, supply, and logistics management during busy times. Each of these areas has well-established forecasts, approaches, tools, and best practices to plan and optimize for business goals and customer needs.

 

Getting these areas right is your baseline for customer delight. They all translate directly onto the needs of customers—availability, choice, speed, and price. Once you have solid foundations in place for demand, supply, and logistics, you can move on to other customer requirements that will lift you above your competitors.

 

Demand management: What the customer wants

The demand management challenge means understanding what the likely demand for a particular product is going to be through peak season, and ensuring you have enough stock availability to meet marketplace requirements. You can achieve this through:

 

  • Strengthening customer and marketplace demand analysis for new and existing products at peak season.
  • Developing more accurate forecasting for cyclical consumer behaviors, marketplace changes, and seasonal trends.
  • Ensuring alignment with sales and promotional activities for marketing products especially given the uptick in marketing during peak season.
  • Ensuring alignment with product development for new releases and product updates.
  • Enhancing demand modeling for various changes to consumer and marketplace behavior outside normal peak season increases.
  • Integrating sales channels together to provide a seamless purchasing experience driven by customer needs.

 

Supply management: What the supply chain can provide

The supply management challenge means establishing that suppliers, manufacturers, and other partners in your supply chain will meet their product commitments. You can achieve this through:

 

  • Establishing strong contractual terms and agreements for product quality and timeliness, especially during busy periods.
  • Getting rigorous performance monitoring in place to quickly identify if supply chain partners are not meeting their commitments.
  • Creating rapid response activities to get supply chain operations back on track if you identify disruption during busy times.
  • Carrying out scenario analysis to ensure supply chain partners are capable of meeting order and manufacturing requirements as demand increases.
  • Building strong risk management and contingencies to deal with supply chain disruptions.

  • Running optimization and continuous improvement projects with supply chain partners to streamline costs, manufacturing times, handovers, quality management, and other areas, especially when the system is strained.

     

Logistics management: How goods flow from supplier to customer

The logistics management challenge means ensuring that your logistics providers can optimize the collection, transport, distribution, handover, and storage of products. This ensures goods are where they need to be, when they need to be there during busy periods. You can achieve this through:

 

  • Understanding what your stock level requirements are likely to be during peak season and using a logistics provider that can provide flexible warehouse space.
  • Taking advantage of logistics providers with warehouses and distribution centers close to where your customers are to ensure faster delivery in busy times.
  • Utilizing a variety of transport methods—rail, road, ocean, or air—that aligns with customer requirements for faster availability.
  • Minimizing administration and overheads for international shipments and complex supply chain handovers.
  • Integrating with logistics provider systems to ensure fast, easy data sharing for accurate monitoring and problem resolution.
  • Using alternative methods for distribution, like ship-from-store.

 

The three management areas above are your baseline—the minimum you can provide for a standard and comfortable customer journey. If you want to elevate that experience to something extraordinary, then it’s important to understand how peak season is changing, and how to rise to that challenge.   

Online ecommerce shopping

How peak season is changing

The global pandemic accelerated the shift to eCommerce and changed the game for delighting customers. While it’s still vital to provide choice, availability, fast delivery, low costs, and easy returns, the need for a seamless consumer experience across all channels introduces substantial new challenges.

 

For traditional retailers, consumers are looking for greater flexibility, convenience, and connection between their digital and real-world experience of retail brands, including:

 

  • Integration between physical and eCommerce retail: Retailer websites must immediately and accurately reflect the same choice, availability, price, and inventory levels as local physical stores.
  • BOPIS: Buy Online, Pick-up In Store: Order products through a company’s website and collect them from a retail location on the same day.
  • BORIS: Buy Online, Return In Store: Order products through a company’s website and return unwanted items at a retail location.

 

Seamless cross-channel support can increase sales in particular sectors.

 

Shopping during peak season adds to these challenges, and some examples include:

 

  • Having enough staff to support in-store pickups and returns.
  • Carrying more stock at local warehouses for fast delivery to stores.
  • Ensuring that goods are packaged properly for customer delivery.
  • Supporting deep integration between e-Commerce and traditional retail.

 

Omnichannel and the peak season customer experience

The ubiquity and acceptance of eCommerce as a result of the pandemic accelerated a change that retailers were already seeing: the move to omnichannel purchasing. Consumers want to buy products on their own terms, across multiple channels, in a fast, friction-free, and convenient environment. 

 

The lines between traditional, website-based eCommerce, mobile, social media shopping, and other marketplaces are increasingly blurred. Making the experience seamless for customers is vital to meeting that unspoken demand.

 

The peak season demands a disciplined, holistic approach to your omnichannel strategy:

 

  • Make every touchpoint shoppable: Customers will switch rapidly between information, applications, and marketplaces when making a purchasing decision. They’re busy, time-starved, and distracted, so make it effortless to buy, no matter what channel they’re using.
  • Provide cross-channel options and support: Moving between online, offline, social, and other shopping channels should be completely seamless. Consumers are looking to make fast choices, so ensure that they and support staff are able to access order, product, and handoff information at all points in the peak season customer journey.
  • Align inventory and experience: Focus on very tight inventory integration and location-based stock levels, especially when customers are switching between online or social ordering and in-store pickup. Reduce delivery times with local warehouses for greater availability and choice during peak season. 
  • Personalize your brand: Recognize your customer wherever they are, with a unified and personalized brand experience across every channel that recognizes and supports omnichannel consumer behaviors. 
  • Offer omnichannel customer service: Peak-season shopping is 24x7 and the support you provide must reflect that. Offer complete access to order information and product tracking, allowing for self-service solutions to common issues. Align customer support processes with logistics management to allow for the rapid resolution of problems.

 

If you want to compete in this brave new world of demanding consumer behaviors, you need the awareness, agility, and flexibility to embrace rapid shifts:

 

  • Continually optimize your peak-season business model based on multiple, complex consumer, supplier, logistics, and marketplace factors.
  • Predict and understand what your customers want, before they want it.
  • Streamline your end-to-end supply chain for peak performance.
  • Partner with a logistics provider that’s as committed and ambitious as you are.

Take your omnichannel strategy to the next level. Connect with GEODIS experts to explore tailored solutions for your unique business needs.

Button Contact us

How logistics in your supply chain lets you meet peak season challenges

Every part of your supply chain, from initial materials sourcing and manufacture through to shipping and distribution to stores, must work together to delight your customers during peak season. Ideally, your supply chain is invisible to consumers—all they see in their shopping cart is the exact item they want, at a reasonable price, delivered to them in the next day or two. They just need to click “Pay!”

 

We’ve already covered some of the supply and demand management initiatives that will see you thrive during peak season. On the demand side you’ll need to focus on consumer and marketplace analysis, rigorous forecasting, business alignment, and channel integration. On the supply side, strong contract management, risk analysis, performance monitoring, contingency planning, and troubleshooting are all critical.

 

We believe it’s necessary to focus equal attention on your logistics management. The speed, flexibility, cost, and quality of your logistics operations directly benefit every other part of your value chain:

 

  • Strong logistics forecasting supports faster lead times between ordering and delivery while ensuring there is appropriate peak season capacity to transport goods quickly, safely, and efficiently.
  • Scaling the logistics workforce provides optimal staffing levels to meet increased supply and demand during peak season.
  • Using robotics and automation allows for round-the-clock logistics operations to handle even the heaviest product demands.
  • Retailer customization means right-sizing logistics transportation, locations, and services based on your omnichannel approach, seasonal trends, and other critical factors.
  • Supply and demand resilience provides a fast, agile, responsive, and flexible approach to risk management, supply chain disruption, marketplace variations, and other areas.
  • Streamlining paperwork reduces delays for handovers between supply chain partners and speeds peak season transit through ports, hubs, borders, and customs.
  • Strong supply chain networks means optimizing logistics operations to be as cost-effective and fast as possible.
  • Diverse pickup and delivery options allow for complete support of online, social, and traditional retail, including BOPIS and BORIS.
  • Robust reverse logistics removes customer effort from returning unwanted items and keeps your return and restocking costs low.

 

Retailers have plenty of options during peak season—if you’re working with the right logistics partner. That 3PL needs to have the agility to select solutions and configurations designed to overcome logistical constraints and achieve a client’s goals. Some 3PLs can adapt and customize, scaling up or down to fit your needs. 

 

With more flexibility than many of the larger carriers, and more extensive resources than the smallest platforms, an agile mid-sized 3PL can identify proven carriers by tapping into a network of contracted and vetted fleets ranging in size and modes to deliver cost-effective and quality solutions. Having these capabilities during peak season is critical when capacity is at a premium.

 

It can be helpful to link logistics provider advantages directly back to delighting your customers during peak season and beyond.

How GEODIS optimizes your peak-season logistics

GEODIS provides:

  • Scenario modeling to predict the products and ranges likely to have the most demand.
  • Advanced logistics forecasting and end-to-end order tracking for every SKU.
  • Integration with supply chain partners for the supply, manufacture, and distribution of every SKU.
  • Inventory capacity for every type of SKU that flexes with peak-season demand.

GEODIS provides:

  • Sophisticated order management to plan in appropriate lead times between ordering items and availability.
  • Real-time tracking of supply chain partners to ensure products are moving from source to destination.
  • Risk management and contingencies to deal with any supply chain delays or disruptions.
  • Flexible workforce to allow for rapid handoff, consolidation, deconsolidation, and transportation to maintain stock levels.

GEODIS provides:

  • Diverse international, national, and local networks to keep products close to customers.
  • Optimization of “last-mile” delivery services for fast transportation between stores, warehouses, and customers.
  • Fleet, employee, and automation options for 24x7 distribution.

GEODIS provides:

  • Economies of scale that provide significant logistics purchasing power with minimal overheads.
  • Deep insight into fixed and variable fees, for a clear link and overall expense of raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, and other costs.
  • Transportation optimization across ocean, air, rail, and road to balance cost and speed with client needs.

GEODIS provides:

  • Seamless and transparent reverse logistics for easy customer interaction.
  • Low reverse logistics costs to minimize the cost impact of returned items and restocking fees.
  • Wide range of local pickup options to collect returns from residential and commercial locations.

GEODIS provides:

  • Integration between store-based and online selling, including the repurposing of traditional store space to meet online needs.
  • Meeting demand for non-traditional pickup options like BOPIS, BOPAC, and BORIS.
  • Close tracking and reaction to changing consumer behaviors and product distribution.
  • Optimize inventory to be “closer to the customer” for flexibility and speed.

GEODIS provides:

  • Reporting that gives logistics, customer service, and other staff complete and transparent information on the status, location, price, and other key factors of the customer’s order.
  • Alignment of stock inventories with sales channels to allow for accurate reconciliation and reordering, based on how items are purchased.
  • An optimized workforce for the additional demands created by omnichannel shopping.
  • A complete, end-to-end, 24x7 ordering, product fulfillment, logistics, and delivery operation.

Today, every channel plays an important role in delighting your customer, with complete synchronization leading to the optimal omnichannel experience. It’s no longer enough to offer a customer the right product at the right time and get it to them how they want it, when they want it—shopping has become personal. Personalization, supported by data and analytics, is one of your most powerful tools to strengthen customer connections and win loyalty.

 

Acing the peak season test requires a great deal, but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We’ll help you identify the areas that need improvement and rise to the challenges of peak season. We have the agility, flexibility, and resources you need to optimize your revenue and delight your customers. 

If you’re ready to outsmart the competition and build trust and advocacy with your customers, contact GEODIS today.

Paul Maplesden

Paul Maplesden

Lead Content Strategist

Paul deeply researches logistics and supply chain topics to create helpful, informative content for our US audience. Read Paul's work in the GEODIS blog, our in-depth GEODIS Insights reports, and our case studies and white papers.
Follow Paul on LinkedIn