Managing expectations through uncertainty
With many retailers concentrating on developing and expanding their eCommerce channel capability, established online retailers and their logistics partners are preparing for a bumper Christmas, as the country is released from lockdown.
In October, the British Retail Consortium launched a national advertising campaign calling on consumers to ‘Shop early, start wrapping, enjoy Christmas’ to help spread out demand during the ongoing pandemic.
And consumers appear to be responding, with many bringing their Christmas purchases forward to make sure they can get the products they are after.
John Lewis is anticipating an online Christmas, with 60% of total sales expected to be from online channels and click-and-collect capability being ramped up massively.
Many retailers expect peak trading will be challenging, as they battle to meet increased delivery demand, in diminishing time windows.
Delivery capacity is going to be limited and retailers will have a job to manage customers’ expectations, or risk damaging their brand promise.
The pressure is on the logistics team to manage capacity with their carriers for guaranteed next-day delivery and they have to ensure that their marketing colleagues don’t oversell that to customers. They need to be able to react swiftly to carrier capacity, universally turning off delivery options that are not achievable, so that they can tailor accurately delivery expectations.
Noatum Logistics’ eCommerce distribution centres support 24-to-48-hour eCommerce deliveries almost anywhere in the world and are scalable to support order picking and fulfilment operations on a highly flexible basis.
The best distribution partners, like Noatum Logistics, will have acted quickly to increase capacity during the lockdown, to support the accelerating digitisation that is now propelling the retail sector.
Royal Mail is hiring 33,000 additional temporary workers to bolster its 90,000 strong workforce, to meet the expected surge in demand for online shopping over the festive period.
Other key parcel carriers are adding new hubs, road capacity, depots, personnel and more pick-up and drop-off locations, to support millions of additional parcels per day going through the network, which is a large increase on last year’s peak].
While it’s clear that demand has increased significantly, it’s critical that retailers and logistics partners are constantly assessing demand scenarios, to ensure they have levers in place to deal with uncertain peaks and troughs.
The perfect location
Strategically located east of Central London, ePoint Medway offers fast access to major ports and airports, and with the national motorway network just minutes away via the M2 and M25, 15.2 million people are accessible within a two-hour drive and 30 million in four hours.
epoint.noatumlogistics.com
