00:00
Hey everyone, welcome to the Ecommerce Unlocked podcast where we always cut the fluff and we talk about the strategies and tactics that you can implement in your e-commerce business so that you can drive real results. I'm Emerson, this, that's a first. That is a first for me. I'm not Emerson, I am Russell. Anyway, I'm Russell, this is Emerson. We are both e-commerce business owners and consultants. We are in e-commerce all day long, and this is, you know, great. We love being here.
00:30
Today we're going to be talking about the holiday. I'm just going dude. We're not stopping for anything. So Emerson, why don't you lead us off on what we're talking about? Yeah, today is the most fun, hectic, crazy thing of the year is holiday shipping. So this is my favorite part of being stressed out the whole year. Russ has been working with me for like a decade plus and those the holiday times for me is grumpy Emerson.
00:57
It just has a little bit of background like you didn't used to be grumpy when it came to like Christmas time the holidays But the past like probably six years like you for Emerson's like no fun Emerson. Yeah. No, I love Christmas Day That's great, but leading up to it. It's like alright shipments gotta go out on the operations world. It's it's crunch time. So There's a couple of things I want to go over today to hopefully alleviate everyone's Pain points through the holidays and kind of go over a solid holiday shipping checklist of items that you can implement
01:27
to hopefully be as less stressed as possible. No matter what, it's always the holidays. There's a lot of moving pieces in the e-commerce supply chain, but really it comes down to communication and having a plan and strategy to work with all your partners during the holiday season. So today I'm gonna kind of break it down into four different parts that I wanna discuss with everyone that most people are gonna run into during the holiday season and groups and categories that people need to work with to ensure a successful holiday season. So before groups we're gonna talk about
01:56
Working with your carriers, so your shipping carriers, UPS, USPS, FedEx, whatever it might be you're using for shipping. Your warehouses, either if you're using a 3PL, if you're doing self-fulfillment, you're doing drop shipping. Going over your policies, so working with your e-comm team, whoever runs your website, making sure you have policies in place to deal with the increased workload and site visits, everything like that during the holidays. Make sure you have policies in place to support your business.
02:24
and then also working with your tech partners and agencies during the holiday season. So on this podcast, typically I am more on the side of operations and supply chain. So Russ, as you bring, you've had a experience in operations with me as well, bringing some marketing insight to make sure we're also working with marketing and everyone understands those expectations together in the business. We don't wanna have marketing doing one thing and ops doing another thing, right Russ?
02:51
Yeah, no, that's we've, we've, I mean, quick flashback, Emerson and I, um, Emerson actually hired me on to do ops with him years ago. And I think our first Black Friday together, the marketing team was supposed to start Black Friday, it was supposed to be like a few days before, like the Monday before Black Friday. And it was like a week and a half before that time. And they called us up and was like, Hey, we're launching Black Friday tomorrow. And I remember that was like, that's one way to piss off Emerson is to say, we're launching Black Friday tomorrow.
03:20
two weeks early and yeah, no, and they did it. We told them no and they still did it. The warehouse was not happy with us. And so yeah, no, I get the pain. And I also get the temptation from a marketing standpoint. It's like, no, dude, we got to do it or we're going to lose sales. So it's a fine balance, balancing marketing with operations. Which is what I kind of piggyback a lot of this, my strategy now on the holiday season is off of that experience. I mean, the goal of this podcast is...
03:49
Let's take some of our wins and failures we've learned through our careers and hopefully give some insights to these areas so you don't have to deal with these pain points. So highlighting that experience is communication is key in supply chain. So anyone doing supply chain, e-comm ops for a while understands there's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of people involved in your supply chain, whether you see them or interact with them on a daily, weekly, monthly basis or personally or not, there's a lot of people that have to be involved on this. And so the more insight you can give your partners,
04:18
in the business, the better your shipping season's gonna go during the holidays. The first one is talking about your carriers. Whether you know it or not, carriers have a capacity that they have on their trucks. It's not like you can, if a FedEx truck comes to your facility and typically you give them 10 packages and then during the holiday season you're giving them 100 packages a day, that's gonna overload the carrier and they're not gonna be able to take all those packages at that time. They have working hours and everything like that. And so- Do they ever refuse packages like, hey dude, I can only take five?
04:47
Yeah, they'll refuse packages. So they said, yeah, they say like one. So there are times they'll say, hey, the trucks full today, we reserve this amount of capacity for it. Usually for the holidays, they want at least like the minimum at least two weeks notice before and there's gonna be a spike in it so they can reserve capacity for you. So if you see during the holidays. How do you let them know though? Like I'm not giving for my business, I'm not giving them like a heads up. I schedule pickups but.
05:14
I guess that's somewhat of a heads up, but it's not like days before, it's like the day before. Yeah. So depending on the size of your brand, if you're going from one package to two packages, five to 10 packages a day and you're doing fulfillment out of your house, you don't have a FedEx rep or a carrier rep that you're dealing with. If you have a size where you have your own accounts with these carriers, that's when you'll have a rep assigned to you, you don't want to reach out to them.
05:38
The same thing too, is you can set up if you're using a FedEx Ship Manager or a USPS Manager, any of the carriers you print labels from directly, you can go in and schedule and add your forecast to that as well. So you can make sure that you have a lot of space in those trucks for you to move those packages. So you'll probably see them on holiday seasons. If you drive by a FedEx, UPS, USPS location over the holidays, anywhere between November to January,
06:07
You'll see a lot of U-Haul trucks, Penske, Enterprise trucks out there, because at that time they scale up and they rent trucks during those holiday seasons. And so if you're not giving them notice, they're not able to rent those trucks and timers or those spaces and et cetera, get extra drivers to handle that extra capacity. And that's when they start cutting it off. So yeah, if you're doing probably under 10 to 20 packages a day, you may not run into it as frequently, but people that are doing up to 50 plus orders a day, you might run into something where you
06:36
the carrier can cut you off and say, hey, we're not picking up those packages. So you wanna work with them to make sure they're understanding you have increased volume coming and what to reserve space for. I would always err on the side of having extra space. I'm not aware of any carriers that if you say, hey, I'm gonna have a hundred packages today and you only have 50, they're not gonna penalize you. So I would go and give them a little bit of an over forecast, let them know this is the size, especially on the type of product size that you're shipping. If you're doing something with small, like a little wallet or a little trinket and a mailer,
07:06
probably can get away with a bit more of a leeway of how many units you're giving them. If you're doing something bigger, you're shipping a suitcase, you're shipping a big toy, big products, that's shipping in a physical box. Those dimensionals or restraints can happen. The next thing you want to be able to do is confirm with your carrier your shipping cutoff times. Okay, so even though you're saying like, hey, FedEx two-day delivery, that can be strained a little bit. And so look, and each carrier is going to have a different cutoff time.
07:35
before something to get delivered on time. So if you're shipping to like a FedEx ground, and you're shipping saying, hey, usually I can ship this on Monday and it'll get to the customer by Friday, typically to that shipping zone. Usually they're gonna increase that FedEx ground or that ground package delivery time a bit longer. So make sure they will have a cutoff time on the carrier's website. Just Google it for whichever carrier you use for like in this year, FedEx 2024 Christmas cutoff day.
08:04
Deadline and they'll tell you all the deadlines for each service level Make sure you know that so you can communicate that to your customers because a customer you want to utilize that for marketing So us I'm sure on your side when you guys when the ops can communicate that to you You can plan your sales accordingly, right? Oh, yeah, totally So I think that's and one piece on that is like from the marketing standpoint You can utilize that to get more sales like kind of a limited time like hey the holiday sale ends this date because that's when shipping cutoff is
08:31
You can even use it after that fact of maybe the ground shipping cutoff, but you have a small enough product You can do the two-day shipping so you do like a free two-day shipping Today only or something like that and you can still get it in time for that for Christmas But the important thing is like kind of blasting it out and communicating it to the customer So one thing is that what I've done in the past is I create like a like a holiday hub Kind of area on a draft it drop down within the website that shows the shipping
08:58
Information so a customer could go there and look at all of our holiday shipping policies has the cutoffs there But then going one step further and putting in the banner putting in the checkout so that people are really clear that like hey Cut off is this date and I and you might hit the semerson But it's like Maybe saying it's the day before it actually is because then you still have to pick and pack and ship and if your warehouse is back And backed up or something. Maybe there are two days behind you got to move that up and it's hard to anticipate but but you kind of have to kind of go with like what you feel most comfortable with because you
09:27
You don't want angry customers. Exactly. That's the worst thing you can do is say, hey, guarantee by delivery for Christmas and it doesn't get there by Christmas. There's always nuances, but as your package is getting lost, the carrier has an unexpected backlog. It's going to a rural address or something like that. There's a lot of things to account for, but you want to have your best chance at success and set yourself up for that. But while you're staying on that, on a marketing standpoint, utilize these cutoffs not as a hindrance, but as a sense of urgency.
09:55
So a lot of times marketers and ops people have to work together and ops we have to do a good job of selling that advantage maybe to marketing and saying like, hey, our cutoff is December 15th for ground shipment delivery and that's where we offer our free shipping. So if you wanna have an item with free shipping, order before December 15th and it'll get you before Christmas. Utilize that as a sense of urgency. If you're putting countdown timers, whatever it is on your site, create that sense of urgency and work together with your marketing team.
10:22
This whole strategy is built around working with your partners, not against them, to make sure everyone has a successful holiday season. And at the same time, Russell, you're talking about. Adding that buffer into fulfillment times, you should always have your fulfillment times buffered into your delivery windows. And that's working with your warehouse to make sure you have that properly staffed. So that kind of segues into talking with our carriers and then going with into our warehouses. Well, I guess 1 last thing before talking about warehouses is understanding with your carriers.
10:50
peak surcharges, something that a lot of brands don't utilize and something I love to geek out on is your shipping rates. Shipping rates are very variable, they're very dynamic, there's a lot of hidden charges, there's hundreds of line items of where a carrier can charge you. And so make sure you understand this because, hey, in October I could ship this package for $10, you're most likely not shipping that same package for $10 in December. So make sure you understand that and make sure that you see if you're doing discounts.
11:17
your holiday sales and however you charge that shipping, how you're charging that shipping to the customer. If you have a fixed price shipping rate, make sure you have that affected and you understand how that affects your bottom line on your store or if you're doing a calculated rates, make sure you have that API working correctly. There's a lot of APIs out there that don't actually pick up all the surcharges because the carriers change them so much, they rename them so often. So just make sure you do a dive into what any carrier peak surcharges you might be happening.
11:46
I mean, the COVID surcharge from 2019 is like pretty much still intact right now. They just like, it's a surcharge and really just like adding to your base rate. So- So question on that. I know a lot, like me personally, I wouldn't even know where to begin to be like, well, how do I look at all these surcharges and this and that? So can you kind of give me an idea of like the percent difference of like, if I ship something for $10 in October, end of November and December, how much is that gonna cost me? Like, what could that variable be? Just so that I can like price it in.
12:15
not have to think about it. Yeah, no. So typically it's gonna be a dollar amount. Let me look up what FedEx is doing. Putting you on the spot. Do you know when it starts as well? Like when do they start implementing these peak surcharges? They all vary. So for example, it looks like FedEx, their peak surcharges is starting on November 27th, 2023.
12:43
Let me see, I'm pulling it up. It looks like, from what I'm seeing right now, FedEx Express, I'm just gonna Google and just Google whatever carrier you're using with. So I would give it semi-generic on that. Google's gonna be our best friend when we try to go in depth, but also carry all the carriers, because all the carriers are gonna be a bit different. But right now we're looking at roughly an increase of around five to 6% increase on Express shipments. Each carrier is gonna have a little bit different.
13:12
things like that. So just make sure you kind of Google it. So yeah, we're looking at express rates will be 5.9% increase during the holidays season. Ground is another 5.9% it looks like. And then freight, FredEx freight is 5.9 to 6.9% depending on zones. So if you're shipping something for $10, again, this is going to have a huge impact at scale. I probably have a budget on that case if you're doing like a $10 item and you're having like 5% shipping.
13:42
surcharge on top of that an extra 50 cents or so to a dollar probably on surcharges. If you're doing again, low volume under 20 orders, that's going to hit a little bit, not much, but when you're doing thousands of orders a day, hundreds of orders a day and do that over the course of a month, that can be the swing of thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars for shipping that you may not have expected before. So just keep that into consideration. Again, there's not much you can, I mean, unless you negotiated a while ago, those surcharges, most likely they're just going to happen.
14:11
It's more of like planning and knowing this is going to happen so you can plan accordingly. Probably your window right now to negotiate those isn't really available to you right now. So just make sure you have that. You just you probably will see that hit your bill. So just make sure you plan accordingly. But yeah, on that same note, working with your carriers and now working with your warehouse. Pretty much the same thing we did with the carriers. We want to notify our warehouse again, making sure they know your order volume so they can staff properly.
14:40
Make sure you know their holiday work schedule if they're working you think they're just off Thanksgiving if they're working Friday Maybe they're taking Thursday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday off. That's four days. Make sure that affects is a Reflex on your website as well So again customers aren't thinking hey I ordered on Wednesday and there orders a ship out till Monday or something like that. That's me a huge backlog Make sure hey you're taking those days off in the warehouse Make sure you have staff coming on Monday to to pick up from from all the holiday rush or whatever Are they working the holidays?
15:10
They might be working Thursdays. Usually the carriers don't work on Thanksgiving itself. Um, so make sure like, Hey, Thursday, it's not a shipping day. Make sure, um, they come in on Friday or whatever. Just, just make sure you understand what, um, the holiday hours of the warehouse are and plan accordingly. And then the other thing too, is before right now, if you haven't started your black Friday sales yet is perform an inventory cycle count. Um, you want to make sure what you have as saying like, Hey, we've got a hundred units of this. You don't want to oversell that stock.
15:36
That's like the worst thing you can do is say, hey, we have 100 units of this and really you have 90 and then 10 people thought they ordered this Christmas present for someone and then now they're not getting it and then that's an angry customer. That can be easily avoided if you make sure your inventory account is accurate. So do your ABC stock counts. Make sure you know what you have in stock and inventory. Again on these, some of these smaller stores doing 10, 20 orders a day with a handful of skews and you're fulfilling from your house or from a small warehouse that you have control over.
16:04
Go in and do it yourself. If not, make sure you schedule your 3PL to take care of that. The next thing is, Russ, I'll probably hand over to you a little bit as far as shipping policies. I'm not sure any policies necessarily, but it's website policies. Maybe that get affected on the website. I'm thinking more about returns, deliveries, and FAQs and stuff like that. Do you want to touch on some of those policies that you do on your home site?
16:27
Absolutely. So our next podcast episode is going to actually go into the details of how to create a successful holiday marketing strategy or campaign. But when it comes down to how it interacts with operations, Emerson called out a really good one, making sure that you change your return policy because a lot of times people buy, depending on when you start your sales, maybe it's November 1st, people are buying a gift in November 1st, but they're not going to give it until December 25th.
16:54
which is usually outside of people's return windows or brands return windows. So making sure that you open that up, my recommendation would be as soon as somebody starts buying in November, you open it up so that they can return it until January 31st. That's kind of a standard set by Amazon. So a lot of people expect it. And I wouldn't say that really negatively affects a business by opening it up during the holiday season, just for the mere fact of being able to return those items.
17:22
Other things, I've already kind of mentioned that it's helpful to have on the website, like a holiday hub, where you can put your gift guides, but you can also put your shipping policies or your shipping information. This is really key back in COVID when you're like, we don't know if it's going to make it or not. You kind of have some disclaimers in there. That's always helpful. We put that within the checkout as well, kind of up at the top, like, hey, just so you know, because of COVID, we may not be able to get it in time as we expect it to be. But you know what?
17:52
We're kind of past that now, so it may not be totally necessary, but if you are worried about either your capacity at your warehouse or your ability to get it to the carrier, even if you're worried about the carrier, I would definitely throw some disclaimers on, on maybe a shipping policy page. And then, using banners, utilizing banners to really put that sense of urgency when it comes time to have those cutoffs, I think is really important as well. And then, every niche, every...
18:20
business kind of has their own little things that they need to throw in there, but I've seen those kind of pretty scalable across the board. Another, no, I'll do that in the next episode. I got a few ideas on how to message these things. I don't want to spill the beans. I just want you to come back to the next episode. To beans, spill, or else. Yeah, the last thing I want to add on that is on your policies and making sure you also update your FAQ or knowledge base that you have. A lot of people with their buying criteria of who they're shopping maybe not for themselves right now, it's for someone else.
18:48
Make sure you have policies of like, hey, if this is for a gift, if someone else is going to get this product, how can they return it? How can they interact with the brand? If there's a warranty they have to register for or whatever, make sure you have knowledge-based FAQ articles to help reduce those inbound inquiries that you might have. And then the last item we'll cover real quick is make sure that if you have any other tech partners that influence your website in any way, make sure you're utilizing those tech partners that need to have the heads up of, Hey, increase.
19:13
volume of people, of site traffic, whatever it might be that you don't have any crashes on that. Make sure they're scaled to make sure that tech doesn't influence any of your sales, website crashes, etc. during that time. And make sure you're leveraging helpful tools to help reduce your CX inbound. Obviously, CX scales and hits pretty hard during the holiday season. A lot of questions are going to come in about your WISMO, where is my order, tracking solutions. So make sure you have a solid tracking page. I'd rather...
19:41
leveraging your order confirmation page. If you're using a third party tracking service, such as like a Wonderment, a Malomo, Phoenix Commerce, et cetera, make sure that you're leveraging those platforms to reduce your WISMOS. Also make sure that you're utilizing an awesome help desk. Gorgias is one of our favorite help desks that we've worked with in the past that make it super easy to communicate with your customers, make it super streamlined, to have automated workflows and processes to get those answers.
20:09
to people's questions quickly through multiple platforms. And then also if you're dealing a lot with shipments of lost, damaged, or stolen transit packages, Corso Ship Protection is who we definitely collaborate with a lot on the podcast. Make sure that you have a good connection there to help reduce any risk of lost, damaged, or stolen packages. Also with Carbon Offsets has a good, do good incentive to that program as well. So make sure you're leveraging these partnerships and your tech integrations appropriately.
20:38
to help reduce your workload during the holidays and make sure that your site runs Optimally throughout the holiday seasons. I'll start with the key points that we have so we'll also link I'm not sure how we'll link it on a podcast But we also have a holiday checklist feel free to follow me or us on LinkedIn and we'll be posting that in the next couple Of days on our LinkedIn. So feel free to download that checklist to make sure that you've yeah Crossed all your t's dialed the i's and checked all the boxes to be on Santa's good list this year by having a good holiday checklist
21:08
So nobody, everybody loves a good checklist, especially if they're an ops, this checklist or lights out this, it's not about checking it, dude, like done, like, okay, we did it. The thing about checklists has never done. It's always like continually checking. You always got to keep going back and checking throughout the holiday. There's a fairy that comes in, erases everything every night that you have to then check tomorrow. Every minute, man. But yeah, this is reiterate communication is key. So keep communicating.
21:37
I know it's the holiday season. We also want to be with our families. We want to be with our loved ones. We want to be enjoying the holidays. Hopefully they'll just like maintain this checklist and keep an open communication. And when something happens, there's going to be something where the warehouse is going to have a day of not so great output. Most likely the carrier is going to get backlogs. Someone's going to have the site. Something's going to happen. Make sure you have a plan A, B, C in place when that does happen. If your shipping rates go down, the API breaks there. Make sure you can quickly enter manual shipping rates
22:07
clog the site. If banners go down, what can you do in that situation? If a carrier is delayed, something happens to your WMS system, your OMS, do you have an extra way to print labels, whatever it is? Is there leverage you have with your warehouse if they're not picking up orders? Is there a way you can come in and get extra hours in there and have people come in and work other shifts, et cetera? So just make sure you have backup plans on top of all these things.
22:34
That is just wrapping up what we need to do on the op side. Super boring. So hopefully we got that out of the, if you made it this far, congrats, you are boring. No, I'm just kidding. Boring's a new sexy, man. Ops finally- Oh yeah, heck yeah. During COVID, people actually talk to me now. Yeah, no, it's cool. It's cool. Yeah, you're way more popular than I am. Well, thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next one.