Navigating Peak Season: Essential Omnichannel & Fulfillment Strategies for Success

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Darby Meegan

Hello, everyone. Thank you for attending today's webinar, navigating peak season, essential omnichannel and fulfillment strategies for success. I'm Darby Meagan. I'm the general manager of our omnichannel warehousing division here at Flexport. It's great to have you today. You're ahead of the curve planning in August. Although, if you have been in ecommerce and logistics for a long time, you know that this is always a perpetual process of planning for peak season. Before we begin, I wanna cover two quick housekeeping items. On your screen that you're looking at me and the slide deck on, you're gonna see a sidebar to the right of the main stage where you can submit questions. At the end of the presentation, we're happy to answer those. We'll be hosting a quick q and a if questions come in, and be sure to get them in as you go. If something comes up in the middle of our presentation, we're happy to get those questions real time, and then we will be addressing them at the end. In that same sidebar, you're gonna see a tab labeled docs. This is where you can download your own copy of today's slides and find a few other helpful resources. If you have any specific questions that you are gonna submit, just a friendly reminder. If it gets too specific, we may reach out to you directly. We're happy to do that. My email, also, if you wanna send a question, dmeegan@flexsport.com. So we're happy to answer those questions. If they get too specific, we may, follow-up with you via email. So with that being said, welcome to our webinar. One quick legal note. Please keep in mind that all the information presented in this session is based on the situation at the current time, may not become customized to your specific business requirements, may not be aware of the specific circumstances that are occurring in your business today. We always recommend reaching out to an expert here at Flexport to discuss that particular situation. If you have any specific questions, again, this is meant to be a point in time presentation. So right before we begin, you will meet two of my esteemed colleagues, Erin Troy, who is the head of customer support and experience for our merchants that are operating on the Flexport warehousing division, and Umesh Laganda. He is our head of product. His team builds a lot of our tech solutions and keeps our network running smoothly from a tech side. We're gonna be covering some operations information. We'll be covering some support information and tech information for how you can be prepared for peak. So as we go into this, couple considerations for peak. This is a bit more of a strategic high level overview. The first one is is that the more you read about what consumer behavior is doing this year, the more you will be confused. Morgan Stanley is forecasting a year over year growth of 3.2. That's adjusted upwards from their prediction for 2026 last year of 2.9%. They did put a caveat, though, that this growth adjustment is based off of oil staying somewhat affordable at below $90 per barrel. That price is changing every single day and is going to be driving additional concerns and things you should be aware of that we'll discuss in a bit. NRF is also citing a 9.41% increase year over year for June. They did put a caveat on that saying that that's largely due to June's inventory position suppressing some sales in 2025 as well as consumer spending and confidence being lower than usual. They are still predicting ecommerce growth throughout the end of the year. They did, however, on the second, they inventory planning second bullet point there, they have cited that a lot of the consumer confidence and consumer spending that's happened in q two this year is based off of consumers' willingness to go spend on retail goods, and they're shopping in person and on websites and being selective, looking for deals, looking for affordability and durable goods in this market. Second one is the cost of your inventory carrying year over year is improving. Interest rates are down comparatively year on year. Tariff situation has improved from a business perspective year on year. However, that is currently counter counterbalanced by increased freight rates due to oil prices, due to congestion, due to lanes shutting down. So one thing to look at as you get closer and closer to peak, it's anticipated that prices may continue at their high levels, and it's worth touching base with your international logistics partner. Hopefully, that's Flexport, but talking about your inventory plan and rates that they anticipate. The big one is is, again, on that marketing standpoint, be aware that consumers are looking for a deal. There is talks everywhere about the k shaped economy. Data is showing that the top 20% of consumers maintain resilience in their spending and are actually increasing that spending and continuing to see year over year growth. There's discussions of the bottom 80% of the economy and spenders that they are looking for those deals. They're searching for it. They may be making more measured purchases and be aware of your email campaigns, your text campaigns, and be following your brand for some time before they place a purchase. That being said, our biggest recommendation from a strategic standpoint is your marketing team may be reacting to the sales that are coming in during peak periods, whether that's the big five or that's the entire peak season. Be locked up with marketing. Understand if they have specific goals they're looking to hit. Communicate those to your logistics provider as soon as possible. Even if it's a hypothetical marketing push, it's a hypothetical social media push, Keep your three p l aware of what's going on so that they can adjust to those volumes as quickly as possible and ensure that speedy delivery to your end consumer. Ultimately, people shop on a timeline during peak. They want to get that for holiday. They wanna make sure that the deals are there, but they also need to get that in time for presents for the holiday season. Three, our biggest thing here, FedEx recently released their peak season surcharges. They've continued the trend. Last year, they sent records with their highest peak season surcharges. This year, they're showing a minimum of 6.7% increase for their peak season surcharges. Also, keep those fuel surcharges front of mind. Your financial forecast for this year may be affected by increased cost above standard. That being said, bundling, sending more SKUs, offering cart benefits as they add more items to cart can help offset that per unit cost when it comes to carrier rates getting to your end consumer. Fuel surcharges are expected to continue. They are mostly benchmarked off of those oil price indexes, so be aware that you may need to plan for sudden changes to your cost basis on those items that then needs to flow back, as I mentioned, to marketing because they may be changing their cost per acquisition metric in light of your landed cost to get to the end consumer. Finally, look for where the consumer is shopping. Whether that's a marketplace or a market expansion for the brand, we're getting up to the timeline of where implementing a new marketplace or a new market is going to be stressful for your tech stack, stressful for your information stack. So first and foremost, the biggest thing is is if any new SKU launches are coming, make sure all of your product data is loaded into your ecommerce platform. Make sure that any HTS codes, product cost, classifications are also attached to your products so that if you activate DDP, DDU shipping or you already have it activated, it is a great thing to tick off the box that you've uploaded and updated your product catalog to the most recent launches that are coming, even if you're doing it in advance. Worst case scenario is you don't wanna get to a point where a consumer wants to buy it and they can't ship it to their market. Second one is for those market marketplace expansions. Look for marketplaces. Shopify has a lot of apps that will allow you to seamlessly communicate that catalog to those marketplaces. Consumers right now are looking for experiences. You wanna be where the consumer is, and that can be in many different platforms in many different places. Having a good integration strategy that seamlessly connects all of those and make sure inventory flows are happening is paramount. Make sure you check for those peak periods your reservation, your held back inventory. You may wanna save 5% for certain marketplaces so that you get it on the highest economical channel, usually your direct site, but also just be aware that in peak periods, some of these social media marketplaces have the ability to blow volumes out of the water, and you would hate to get into a situation where you're overselling. Finally, as you are approaching peak season, considering your inventory allocation by that marketplace warehouse, by your own warehouses in The United States, regionally, whether that's internationally, having that inventory balance and available for consumers and hopefully fungible between markets and marketplaces is the most ideal situation. Inventory positions have improved this year with a reduced inventory carrying cost of both interest rates and tariffs. So the good news is is that brands are reporting healthy inventory positions and the ability to meet peak demand. Make sure you're allocating that inventory accurately and make sure you reserve that inventory for the most cost effective marketplace and market. Quick little showcase of our network. This is a soft, discussion here. Toronto is for us live for peak season. If you would like to move into the Canadian market, we have a warehouse available that we can inbound to and get it localized to the Canadian market. There's some considerations when it comes to customs and tax. Feel free to reach out again to me or your account manager or anyone on our team, but we are happy to announce that Toronto is available for shipping for this peak season. We can inbound it. We can get those to the Canadian customers with great effect. So, really excited about that. The other one here is you're seeing the five other warehouses that maybe you've grown to know and love in our warehouse network. Those warehouses are positioned so that we can hit about 80% of consumers in two or three day shipping depending on where they're located and do that cost economically. So balancing your inventory, making sure that it's available to distribute across The United States, whether it's with us or another three p l, is front of mind. Because, ultimately, that inventory position is going to determine both the cost to serve a customer, but the customer experience that they receive whenever they do order. With that said, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Erin Troy, that I mentioned, head of customer support. She's gonna give you a bit about what to expect this peak season. Erin, take it away.

Erin Troy

Awesome. Thanks, Darby. As we dive into what to expect this peak season, very similar to we learned a lot as we've gone into our own buildings. We've really figured out what our mechanism look like, how we get good at what we're doing. And first and foremost, this planning process is not a couple month process. This is a full year exercise. In the beginning of the year, we're looking at what have we learned from the previous peak season? How do we get better next year? And then we start that peak planning process really right away. We have members from each member, org of our team. So we have our planning, our engineering, our customer support, our operation teams, all coming together to make sure we're putting together the best possible plan so that we're executing on peak well. We also are working on early communication. So hopefully, everyone got the email in the last few weeks about our cutoffs, which we'll talk about here in the next slide, for inbound. And then we'll have our outbound cutoffs here in the next few, hopefully weeks. Worst case scenario, late September. But we are getting those out to you so that you can plan for your cycle, getting those units into the network, getting them received, and getting them ready for sale. We are working on continuously updating our carrier strategy. So we have both national and regional, and then our hyperlocal carrier. So we do make sure we're, carrying a mix of carriers so that we can get you guys the, not only the fastest available solution, but also the best price as well and best experience. A lot of the ones that we, are starting to have conversations with are bringing on different tech stacks that are just driving that customer experience for you and your end customer, which is a huge win. So we're constantly RF being and evaluating our our carrier partners there. Next is twenty four hour operation. So, we'll talk through, we talk through pretty regularly what staffing we need at sites. And when we go into peak, we have to almost four x our staffing capacity for these sites. And so we're doing that right now. We're launching these night shifts. We're getting them trained up on different parts of the business. We're making sure that we're hiring way far in advance of peak so that those folks are trained. They're able to execute, and they're able to execute well so that you have the best possible peak experience. Some of our buildings, again, have already launched those night shifts, and we'll ramp up across all of those buildings as we go into peak. And then as Darby mentioned, we're starting to look at different warehouses, adding capacity across not only The US, but we just launched that Canada facility. So that's additional capacity that we have for our merchants to expand, you know, internationally, and we have some more more things coming, hopefully. And then last but not least, scaling up customer support. So making sure that we're on seven days a week so that we can help you with your orders, your backlog management, anything that you need. We will be on chat so that you can write in and you'll get a customer support agent right away. That brings us to our next slide here, those peak key dates that we had talked about. Again, if you haven't gotten the email, we do have a help center article that is titled key dates for peak, and this has all the same content on there. So I'll just kinda walk you through what you should be looking at here. So the first two lines are gonna be your d to c or ecommerce inbound. So that's gonna be the stuff that you're sending right into, the dtocorg and can be received right away or would need prep, which would we need an extra couple of days. But that'll be available for sale right away. Those are gonna be your your, your latest timelines, I would say. As we go down the the chart here, we also have reserved storage replenishments. And so those are the ones that we need a couple extra days to get, with prep, to get prepped and to get into the network. And so, just keep a track. We won't go through all of the dates here, but just keep track of what the very specific inbounds are that you're sending in. Is it a replenishment? Is it, direct to inbounds? And dude doesn't need prep, because those are just additional touch points that we wanna make sure we're getting right, and we're getting them to the buildings at a timely manner. As I mentioned earlier, we do not have the carrier cutoff dates. We're dependent on the carriers to give us those dates. And so they're figuring that out. They're figuring out their peak surcharge pricing and getting that finalized right now, and that they should get that to us here in the next few weeks so that we can we'll get it, out to you as soon as we have all of those, compiled. As we go to the bottom of this table, we look at the reserve storage, SLAs. Those are gonna continue to follow that seventy two hour time frame. If they are requiring prep, they're gonna bring them out to five days, pretty similar to what you see now. Removals and disposals is where you're gonna see the biggest difference here. Because right now, we have a fourteen day SLA. That's obviously not gonna be maintained during peak because those are gonna take lower priorities. We wanna make sure we're getting your outbound orders and your inventory into stock, and that's where the allocation of our labor is. We do try to make sure we're labor planning for all of those. And so that's why we ask that you get those in as soon as possible so that we can make sure we're executing those, as best as possible. Again, when we talk about, say you have an issue come up, say you need help with something, how do you contact customer support? We have a couple ways that you can interact with my team. First is the help center. So we have a help center that highlights all of these things. The page is called contacting support, and that will give your latest support updates for peak. Should have our updated hours, which you see reflected here, and then just a couple different links that will direct you to the right place. You also have your chatbot. So when you're logged into seller portal, right on that bottom, right hand, you'll see a little chat widget. You can just bring that right up and you can be contacted, by customer support right away there, as long as it's within, the business hours. And last but not least, say we're outside of business hours. We have a ticketing system, and we're working on we have people right on-site right now, that can help answer those pretty pretty quickly. We do hold our tickets based on SLA. So we have our urgent issues, right, Saying there's something widespread needs immediate escalation. We have a ton of alerts on our side that get those looked at right away. We have our high, which is significant issues that require timely resolution, but do not stop our operations and then your normal issues that you see regularly. So, we categorize our ticket types by those and our response times as well. And last but not least, we do have a phone support available as well. So if there's an issue, you're having some challenges, you can't get through to our line, you you are able to call that phone support line, and they'll direct you to someone on our team, and we'll get you a callback, pretty quickly. So a lot of different ways that you can interact with the team. We are here to help. We've seen, you know, if there's something going on that's affecting multiple merchants, we're able to help, we're able to dive in. But please make sure you're using us as a resource. Our team is monitoring those queues very closely during peak. We staff up during peak. And, honestly, this is especially for customer support, something we we're training for all year round. So, pretty excited to go into this week again. I think it's one that we're very well suited to execute well. And Umesh will talk a little bit more about some of the ways that you can optimize your setup as you you head into peak.

Umesh Loganda

Awesome. Thank you, Erin. Hi, everybody. My name is Umesh. I lead the product management team here at Flexport. So we build all of the technology that you guys use in our seller portal as well as in our facilities. So I've got a few tips and tricks for you guys as you plan through your, peak for 2026. And, the links over there, that'll be very helpful for you guys depending on, like, if you're using our seller portal and, like, all of the integrations, no code integrations that we provide versus if you are directly integrated with our APIs, etcetera. Right? So the first thing is about forecasting. Right? I mean, like, forecast what your peak volume is going to look like. Hopefully, a lot of you guys have already done that. A couple of reports that we have on our seller portal, Autostash, all orders, and Autostash shipments should be super, super helpful in that particular process for you guys to look at, like, your historic sales numbers and order numbers, etcetera. Right? So for, accounts that have account managers appointed on Darby's team, communicate changes with them and communicate the changes frequently, particularly using our seller portal as well as, like, directly to your account managers. The other very important thing is updating your product details. Darby touched on this a little bit earlier. HTS codes, dimensions, or any other criteria about these particular products, please make sure that, like, those are updated, particularly barcodes. Right? Like, barcodes that, that you have on the system and physically on the product need to match. Those are some of the times when things enter into the noncompliant state and, lead to issues downstream as we try to process the your orders, etcetera. So look for those pieces. And large products is another area to pay some attention to. If you have products that are over 20 pounds and a certain size of eighteen, fourteen 18 by 14 by eight inches, they have to come in to, ship in your own container ready. All of this information is available in the help center articles, as well as, like, other details emails that we've sent you guys, so please review them. And finally, all of the, inbounding, timelines that Erin touched upon earlier, the the seller portal will guide you through all of the steps necessary, to to ship them in, like, a very noncompliant way. So please review them, as well. On the outbound side of things, successful outbounds obviously start inbounds. So, again, reiterating, follow follow the steps that's outlined in our seller portal, review the help center articles there. For all of your marketplaces that you are integrated with us, do test out a few orders and, like, review that. Like, you see the tracking pages, the service levels, everything, end to end so that, like, you you can work with us if you find any issues, etcetera. Tools at least one month ahead of peak, so that, like, you you all, build confidence together on that one. Tracking every shipment is one of the key questions that we get, and all of our merchants tell us that, like, that's one of the key questions they get as well. You can go to seller portal and, like, review the order information. You can search by the order number on shop Shopify order number or, like, if you have an ERP, that order number as well as by even customer's address and, like, a few different details to make it super easy to find those orders. And within those order pages, we'll have a tracking link that you can copy and share with your customers as well. Right? So, please take a look at that if you've not seen that previously. That'll have a link to the actual carriers, tracking page as well, including proof of delivery photographs over there. And for orders that are placed on the holidays, Thanksgiving, and so on, will be still delivered within our SLAs on time. They may not ship on the same days because on those particular days, the facilities may be closed or carriers may not be operating on those days, but the SLAs, will still be followed on those business days. K? I'll call my, colleagues back on the stage to take any question and answers here. Yeah.

Darby Meegan

Thank you, Umesh. I think the big thing to stress for people who are looking for tactical, the big question that always comes up over and over again is what is that carrier cutoff for arrival by Christmas Eve? This year, we have not yet determined that. Usually, that gets determined in about a month. The other thing there is that's a little bit of a moving date. So there's a question that came in about, do you anticipate carrier delays? So I'm reading a bit into that question, which is that last final date will be there. The other side is is we do see, and we will be able to communicate to you the need to upgrade packages if they come in. So, usually, it's about eight days before December 25 that we recommend coming in. Carrier congestion can become quite a problem. One thing there, Aaron mentioned, this is a multi carrier strategy. Talk to your three p l's about their forecast that they've shared with FedEx, with UPS, with USPS, with the Fujitsu, UniOne, any of these carriers. Make sure that your three p l has a clear forecast from you. Make sure that you understand what allocations you get if there's drop trailers. The biggest unforeseen thing with carrier delays in peak season is almost always weather, and it's almost always regional. Recently, I think about a month ago, we saw weather delays in Nashville at a big air hub in the carrier networks caused delays nationwide for one, two, and three day packages. So it's worth considering that sometimes windy conditions in one market can cause the entire package network to slow down when it comes to those expedited parcels. Again, we anticipate September, we will be announcing that final cutoff. Activating tracking. That's another reason for carrier delays. Making sure that your tracking pages, whether you use one provided by your three p l like we do, whether you use one provided by a service partner, or you use the ones directly with the carriers, ensuring you understand what delays look like and can be communicated. Oftentimes, we will post weather updates and ZIP codes that are attached to those weather updates, but it's worth noting that it might be worth sending an email. Our suggestion there is to have an email prepped, in the case of an a traumatic event that you can quickly send to customers who may be impacted. So thank you for that question about carrier delays. One other quick quick there is most of the national carriers have cited building, larger capacity in their network over the last three years for the growing ecommerce, demand in The United States. So, the national carriers are there, but it's always good to pivot when you can if they get congested. Umesh, a bit of a conversation for you. A question came in about our Toronto facility and if we're capable of shipping d two c orders into The United States, if we're able to offer duty drawback services for any inventory that may be going from The United States into Canada or vice versa. I'll get that to you.

Umesh Loganda

Yeah. So the Toronto facility is geared towards, largely local domestic Canadian orders because, like, we support that out of our US facilities today. This will just make it, more efficient, cost efficient, and, like, better service for our customers. So that's the primary thing. Like but in next year, we will be looking at expanding international shipping from there as well. Yeah.

Darby Meegan

Alright. Aaron, I'm seeing a question about inbound delays. They're mentioning the November 6 deadline and asking if they have an inbound that's coming in late. What's our recommendation if delays on the ocean, delays with customs, push an inbound past that November 6 date for priority inventory?

Erin Troy

Yeah. I would say flag it, to either your account manager or your customer support rep. If you can flag it and we know it's coming in, we can plan for it. But the biggest thing is to let us know that we are going to be this inventory is needed for peak, and that we need to flag it to our ops partners. Communication. Communication. Communication. Yeah.

Darby Meegan

That's right. And as soon as you have a forecast, share it, both inbound and outbound. It helps us to plan, helps your three p l to plan. So sharing that Usually, we lock on a four week firm and a twelve week outlook that is a soft, and then we're doing six to twelve months of planning otherwise. So for outbounds, it's much more, regimented in that approach. Inbounds seemingly move a day or two at a time. So that's a great question. With that being said, there's a question about some perspectives on, this peak and what we anticipate on volumes. I'll leave that one for a direct conversation with, maybe my email or your account manager. We're happy to field that question. It feels a bit specific. Big thing is is the economy is an interesting thing, and there's everybody has a different perspective on what the consumer's doing there. Umesh, I'll give you the first last word. Is there anything you would like to add, suggest, or just get out into the ether regarding this peak season as when it comes to customers using three p l's or Flexport customers?

Umesh Loganda

I think for our customers, I would say, like, the seller portal is the best place and, like, familiarize themselves with all of the tools that we have. It's fairly intuitive and, like, self serve and, like, all of the tools that you need, the help center that Erin talked about, like chat, all of that is in one place. So, like, familiarize yourself one more time just, in part of Big Prep. That's, I think, what I would say. Yeah.

Darby Meegan

Lovely. Aaron, same question to you.

Erin Troy

Yeah. I'm just gonna put my funder with, the help center, but we we're constantly working on revising and updating our help center as well. So if you have a question, it's more than likely answered in a page there. So have that be your first place that you're going. And we probably have quite a bit of detail, honestly, on the page. But secondarily, right, our chat team is always ready to be answering your questions. We're working on expanding the hours that they're available to you guys as a resource, and they're constantly being trained to be, more and more dangerous, and effective in in answering those those questions. So, like I mentioned, communication is key. Let us know. We'll flag it to our partners. We have teams on-site now, which is a huge win, because they can walk over to their ops partner and say, hey. We need this done right now, or, hey. This is something that, we need to look at. We need to take this inventory offline. We need to visually audit it. That's a huge win over the past few years. So our team's there to be leveraged. Please message us.

Darby Meegan

Umesh, there's one more question that's come in. When does code freeze begin so that we stop releasing new features and we're really focused on the resilience of our systems? I'll give you that

Umesh Loganda

Yeah.

Darby Meegan

quick question.

Umesh Loganda

That definitely has to be one of our customers using our APIs there. So. our, tech code freeze starts early November and goes on till the first week of January. That's only a freeze for net new features. Right? Like, so we won't launch new features, and we'll be basing towards stabilizing our systems and, like, existing features. But support does not change. Right? Like, if you have an issue if you have an issue, if any of our partners have an issue, that will take priority and, like, those fixes will go in. We just have a much rigorous process. So shouldn't, change anything for our customers per se. Yeah.

Darby Meegan

Great question. Great answer. One follow-up to Aaron's. I love to link our support documentation in a cloud session and ask specific questions because often it will give you the best page to jump to. Our search function's great. Sometimes it gives you a bit more than you're looking for because the keywords and logistics seem to be used in every page of our support because everything's intermingled. So I love to let Claude, analyze our help center documentation and give me that fast sprint to that. Great. We're just about time. I will say the only other thing would be is peak season's already started. Inbounds are roaring. They will be continuing, then outbounds begin. As Aaron mentioned, we do start shifting labor because we know the way that our customers make money is by shipping outbound, communicate those forecasts, and then returns starts in full force mid December and will go until about mid February. So, communicate what you can on forecast. We hope and wish you the best when it comes to, your business, your peak season. We hope that you're planning well. We hope that everything goes well and according to plan, and we hope you exceed your forecast even if it may been that, it's putting stress on us at the warehouse to ship more orders than we originally planned. So thank you so much for attending our webinar today. We appreciate your time. We hope that it's a successful peak season, and we will be in touch and hope you will be too. So we'll talk soon. Y'all have a great day. Thanks for joining us.