FedEx is Prepared to Handle Another Busy Holiday Season in 2021

With the continued surge in eCommerce demand, retailers and consumers have come to recognize that the unpredictable and unexpected are often completely unavoidable. With an upcoming Peak season that may prove busier than 2020, properly preparing is key.

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I firmly believe that one of the keys to a successful holiday shopping and shipping season lies in providing various ways for retailers and consumers to ship and receive their packages.

There isn’t a one-size-fits all solution, and my teams at FedEx are constantly devising ways to offer more choice for retailers to get their products into the hands of consumers that want them.

Take, for example, the concept of ‘fast’ delivery. While speed of deliveries has recently been heralded as the pinnacle of successful shipments, we are finding that predictability is overriding ‘fast’ in terms of preference.

A March consumer study commissioned by FedEx found that convenience is less about receiving items fast than it is about reducing the time and effort it takes to shop at brick-and-mortar stores.

In fact, 73% of respondents replied “no” to the question, “When shopping online, is convenience about getting items as fast as you can?” People now see convenience as shopping from home at a time that is convenient for them, and not having to deal with crowds and lines.

Similarly, our retail customers crave visibility and accuracy so they can appropriately communicate with their own customers. Heading into Peak, we’re improving visibility by refining machine learning to be more precise around Estimated Delivery Date (EDD) from the point of shipment and along the package journey.

We’re also increasingly seeing interest from consumers in managing when and where their packages are shipped. To-date, we’ve enrolled 35.7M consumers in FedEx Delivery Manager, which proactively notifies registrants of packages being delivered to their residence and provides them with pickup options at convenient locations including FedEx Office, Walgreens, and select Dollar General stores.

FedEx Passionate About Supporting Customers

Ultimately, we are passionate about supporting our customers – from the millions of small business retailers to large enterprise customers – to help handle their growing eCommerce volume and find creative and innovative solutions whenever we can.

At FedEx, we do this through our commitment to seven-day residential delivery to get packages to customers’ homes – every day of the week.

We’re also investing in our infrastructure by adding new hubs and sorting facilities, enhancing package handling and delivery capabilities, and adding tens of thousands of team members to help keep pace with demand.

Our teams are working every day to help ensure our robust network delivers on behalf of our customers, and the consumers that count on them.

See Also: Please check out our Q&A feature with Ryan Kelly from earlier this year discussing how FedEx makes returns easier.

About the Author: Ryan Kelly is the Vice President of eCommerce and Alliance Marketing for FedEx Services. This guest post was provided by FedEx and the views expressed herein are the authors’ alone.

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