Taming holiday craziness

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Taming holiday craziness

As order volume soars during the holidays, so do shipping challenges.
UPS can help with special solutions and expertise.

Each holiday season, Jeffrey Braverman of Nuts Online knows what’s coming. It’s going to be, well, nuts. Orders double, and the work days become work evenings – and sometimes work nights.

You are always scrambling,” says Braverman. The family-owned Linden, N.J.-based company ships everything from nuts to dried fruit to coffee. Normally, Nuts Online sends out about 500 orders a day. During the holiday rush, that number grows to 1,000 orders a day or more.

Shipping managers everywhere know the challenge. Kids go back to school, the weather cools down and the holiday crunch begins – sometimes even earlier than Halloween.

The only way to succeed is through careful planning. It also helps to have UPS as a shipping partner with years of experience in package delivery, supply chain management and technology- based shipping solutions. To meet the holiday volume spike, UPS tailors its solutions to customers’ needs – like providing on-site trailers in the case of Nuts Online.

“UPS has been a great partner for us and has been a key part of growing our business,” says Braverman. The need for planning is obvious when you consider the holiday shipping volume. UPS processed an average of about 240 packages per second through its worldwide air and ground network last Dec. 20, its busiest day of the year.

Online shopping

More and more, a major part of the holiday shipping rush is driven by online orders. Last year, U.S. retail e-commerce sales in the fourth quarter totaled almost $33.8 billion, or about 3.3 percent of total retail sales for the period. While still a small part of retail sales, that’s almost double the $17.3 billion spent online in the fourth quarter of 2003, according to an eMarketer.com report based on U.S. Census Bureau data. And, of course, nearly every online purchase requires shipping.

Gauging day-to-day holiday demand for a web-based business can be difficult because the Internet is open 24 hours a day. At Nuts Online, orders come in all week and weekend long, so operations run seven days a week. Each day in November and December, UPS brings in a 52-foot tractor-trailer to the company’s fulfillment facility. Being able to load the tractor-trailer directly significantly saves time and gets orders into the UPS network promptly.

The statistical information included here was current at the time it was published in 2007. To see more recent statistics, visit our pressroom.

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