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Holiday Shipping Delays

WHY THEY MATTER AND HOW YOU CAN MANAGE THEM

Shipping around the holidays is already stressful, but supply chain issues and worker shortages will worsen shipping issues this year. As a small business trying to deliver a quality product to your customers, it’s important to start thinking ahead as soon as possible. How can you anticipate holiday shipping delays and make sure your customers stay happy? Read on for our top tips.

Encourage Customers to Shop Early

If you wait until Black Friday to have your big sale, customers may find themselves waiting extended periods for their purchase. Instead, encourage your customers to do their holiday shopping early—run your big sale two weeks before Black Friday, for instance, or send out a holiday shopping reminder email earlier in November. If your customers are shopping earlier, they’ll most likely get their purchases more quickly.

Expect and Communicate Delays

This season, everyone is experiencing backups. Customers will probably understand if you can’t get an item to them in two days. However, they’ll be less understanding if you promise them two-day delivery and it takes ten days. Don’t over-promise—give your customers a clear and honest estimate of when they’ll receive their product, and if delays occur, try to communicate promptly. While it can be tempting to promise three-day delivery on all products, make sure you can back up your promise, so you don’t end up with disappointed customers and late packages.

Choose a Shipping Partner that Offers Reporting

Especially during the holiday season, it’s important that your shipping partner can give you a snapshot of what’s going on. Your partner should work with you and be transparent about average shipping times, delays, and where and when your packages are going out. If you don’t know what’s going on once a product leaves your facility, you won’t be able to help customers understand either.


The shipping season promises to be a hectic one for online sellers. While you may not eliminate all shipping delays, you can help mitigate their effects for both you and your customers with extra thought and preparation. By encouraging your customers to avoid peak shipping times, communicating expectations and delays upfront with shoppers, and choosing a shipping partner that can help you make sense of what’s going on, you’ll be able to handle holiday shipping delays with a minimum amount of stress.

Kable Product Services can help you create a tailor-made shipping plan for your company and work with you to mitigate delays and understand the shipping process. We can help you ensure that with a little help and preparation, the shipping rush is a (mostly) stress-free process!