700 million packages will be stranded?! Major logistics companies are overwhelmed!

Recently, a major news is spreading on the Internet. The orders for Cyber ​​Monday and Black Friday were so overwhelming that they directly filled up the transportation capacity of various logistics companies! More than 700 million packages will face detention and delayed delivery!

According to data disclosed by relevant agencies, starting from the second half of November, the on-time delivery rates of FedEx, UPS and the United States Postal Service have all declined to a certain extent. In addition, these logistics companies all issued warnings to some large shippers in November, stating that the current transportation capacity is close to its limit. Both FedEx and UPS are facing a shortage of trucks and manpower and are unable to complete the last mile of package delivery.

The situation of USPS is even more serious, because the US election in early November adopted the mail-in voting mechanism, which occupied a large amount of USPS's transportation capacity. This impact has not ended until now, and Trump often reports that some post offices have a backlog of thousands of ballots that have not been counted. This also makes USPS unable to fully deliver the recent peak season packages, and the impact of the large delivery demand on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday can be said to be adding insult to injury. Some companies have already received packages returned by USPS due to inability to deliver.

During the peak order delivery period of Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, major logistics companies had to handle 18 million more packages every day than last year. Although they added more employees and equipment, they still needed to extend the estimated delivery time to an average of more than one week, and had to limit the commissions of some retailers to avoid clogging the entire logistics system.

Even so, there is still a great possibility of a capacity crisis between early December and before Christmas. As a result, about 5% of express parcels worldwide will have to be delayed in delivery, and the total number may exceed 700 million!

This is also the situation we analyzed when we previously reported on Amazon's promotion of multiple pickup methods. At that time, I analyzed that the six newly launched self-pickup methods had many disadvantages, but compared with the packages being stranded and unable to be delivered, they were definitely better.

Apparently Amazon had anticipated that there would be problems at the end of the order delivery process and had prepared response plans in advance . This coincides with the problem of "lack of personnel and transportation capacity for last-mile delivery" reflected by the FedEx and UPS.

These functions have little effect on delayed delivery of orders, and we sellers still need to be prepared for possible customer complaints about delayed orders. (You can also discuss countermeasures in our seller group, add me zyqmda to invite you to the group)

Not only does logistics cheat sellers during this peak season, but their advertising expenses are also more outrageous than in usual peak seasons.

Data agency Kenshoo recently revealed a set of data that during this year's Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, offline store traffic plummeted by 52.1% compared to last year, a decline far exceeding the expectations of many experts. However, due to the booming online sales, the overall retail sales in this peak season will still increase by 3.6% to 5.2% compared to last year.

The surge in online traffic has also led to a surge in sellers’ marketing costs. The advertising bids on e-commerce platforms (such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target) have increased to 3.1 times the usual price , and the price of paid search ads on Google has also nearly tripled. The bidding on social networks has also exceeded 2 times.

Statistics show that beauty and personal care products are the category with the most advertising, accounting for more than 24% of e-commerce advertising during the entire peak season, followed by consumer electronics products, which also account for as much as 21%.

The price of ad clicks on e-commerce platforms led by Amazon also rose during the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday periods. The overall advertising expenditure of sellers increased by more than 60%, but the increase in click volume was only 45% . This shows that more and more sellers are constantly increasing their click bids to gain traffic. Such bidding wars will definitely become a vicious cycle in the long run, making advertising more and more unaffordable and the effect will become worse and worse.