5 Best Practices for Handling Deliveries During Peak Season

While absolute volumes are hard to predict, peak season deliveries are always well above monthly averages—sometimes explosively so. Handling deliveries at higher volumes leads to overburdened systems, jammed up docks and frustration for drivers and customers.

Last mile delivery challenges are difficult enough without adding uncertainty around retail spending and freight volumes to the mix, but operators who plan for heavy demand and increase flexibility will get through peak season with fewer hiccups. Online commerce, a key driver of seasonal shipments, continues to grow: Global e-commerce sales will account for $6.86 trillion in 2025, an 8.37% increase from 2024, and its share of retail sales—projected at 21%—continues to climb.

For the foreseeable future, last mile delivery organizations will face increasingly tougher tests of their ability to delight customers with excellent experiences. That's critical to success: Statistics vary, but in survey after survey, more than half of customers say they won't re-order from a business if they're disappointed by a single delivery experience. 

As iconic investor Warren Buffet noted, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it." Building brand loyalty is tough in the best of times, but good delivery experiences—especially in peak season when competitors may be failing—can have an outsized impact on your repeat business. 

Implementing best practices is the first step toward burnishing your brand image and making sure you're handling deliveries when you're at your busiest. You'll also benefit from efficiencies—like reducing fuel and labor costs—that will burnish the bottom line. 

1. Make Sure You’re Maximizing Capacity

The first challenge around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas is matching your delivery capacity to your projected order volumes. While those projections are just that—guesstimates—the volumes will be higher than your monthly averages. To match higher volumes with capacity, you need to know what your capacity actually is. Without the right tools, this can be very difficult if not impossible. 

More often than not, when businesses feel like they can’t meet delivery demand no matter how many trucks they add, the issue is actually route optimization. While you may have a sense of how many deliveries your fleet should make each day, your drivers continuously run late and can’t finish their assigned deliveries because it’s not clear how long each delivery will actually take. 

That’s why route optimization is crucial. AI-enabled route planning does three essential things: It ensures your vehicles are driving the fewest miles between stops, it matches vehicle capability and crew skills so the right trucks get assigned for each stop, and it correctly estimates the time needed for each stop. This results in ETAs that are highly accurate so your trucks arrive on time and customers are satisfied. 

If your routing platform allows what-if planning, you can game out scenarios for higher volumes in advance. You will be able to see what your maximum capacity is with your existing fleet so you only add extra trucks (or contractors, or 3PL partners) when they're actually needed.

2. Optimize Your Distribution Network

Route optimization can help ensure you’re driving the fewest possible miles and correctly gauge the time per stop so you deliver more orders. During peak demand, you can boost the benefits of route optimization by making sure your distribution network is optimized. If you know from past holiday seasons how your orders are likely to be clustered geographically—or not—you can see where you need to place warehouses and distribution centers. Whether these are fixed, permanent facilities or even temporary or mobile mini-hubs, they can minimize drive times and maximize fleet capacity utilization.

All you need is historical delivery data and robust AI-powered route optimization technology. When your route optimizing software is lightning-fast and incredibly accurate, you can run potential what-if scenarios on hypothetical order data to determine the optimal network for meeting high demand. You'll be able to see how to get customers their deliveries on time.

3. Confirm Delivery Appointments in Advance

When you confirm with your customers before the day of delivery that the scheduled delivery window works for them, their order is accurate, and their address is correct, you can significantly cut the number of deliveries that fail because the customer isn’t at home. Since failed deliveries are costly and complicate future delivery plans—with redeliveries competing for space with new ones—the negative impact is effectively doubled: You make two deliveries while getting paid for one, and the second “free” delivery keeps you from making an additional paid one. Your FADR (First Attempt Delivery Rate) matters. A lot.

Fixing your FADR is common sense, but it's also a challenge to make the phone calls required. Especially for larger organizations and especially in peak season, calling everyone on the schedule individually is an operational nightmare, and the labor cost could wipe out the savings from a higher FADR.

Again, last mile delivery technology can provide an answer. The best last mile delivery software allows customers to set their own delivery windows online by choosing among a set of delivery windows that are already optimized for your fleet, schedule and existing orders. If they set their own delivery time, they're more likely to be there to receive the order. Unconfirmed deliveries can be flagged so you can follow up. Pre-route notifications, day-of reminders, ETA updates and live tracking—a feature that is universally desired by customers—should all be part of the package. 

This is an area where AI can also be a game changer. Learn how AI-powered agents can improve customer experience in your last mile deliveries. 

4. Adopt Technology That Actually Scales

Handling deliveries at higher volume means your operation will be stressed across the board: Routing more stops than usual, sending out more notifications, tracking more deliveries, and potentially managing more drivers, additional carriers or contractors. 

Meeting those demands can be difficult. If you don't already have the right processes in place that just means you'll be more inefficient on a larger scale. 

You need technology that’s built to handle as many orders as you can throw at it without slowing down. Unlike legacy software, particularly solutions using on-premises servers, SaaS last mile tracking software that is built in the cloud from the ground up can increase processing power as needed to call your customers, route your orders and track deliveries without missing a beat.

5. Visibility, Visibility, Visibility

You can do a lot to prepare for peak season deliveries with better planning, better processes and better technology. But once the orders have been routed, dispatched, and loaded onto trucks, it’s no longer about how well you can plan, but about how effectively you can execute those plans in real time. AI-optimized route planning can give highly-accurate ETA predictions to help ensure things stay on track most of the time, but there’s no way to predict everything that’s going to happen on the day of delivery. A wreck that closes a key highway or bridge, a monsoon or blizzard or a delivery unit that breaks down can upset the best laid plans. 

To successfully ramp up deliveries of higher order volumes, you need to build flexibility and adaptability throughout your delivery process.The key is end-to-end last mile visibility.

When you can see at a single glance what’s going right—and what isn’t—you can proactively intervene to keep plans on track and prevent late deliveries from piling up.

While truck location and status is important, handling peak season deliveries requires deeper data insights from all parts of your delivery management platform. That includes visibility across teams and functions (sales, warehouse and delivery) and for the ultimate customer. Providing visibility to your customers helps reduce failed deliveries and ensure delightful deliveries no matter how busy the season gets. 

Start Now to Succeed at Handling Deliveries This Season 

Scaling with robust technology, preplanning for different volumes, understanding your fleet capacity and being able to see in granular detail how your delivery operation is performing—and predicting where it might fail—are the keys to surviving and thriving in the upcoming holiday season. The time to start is now. Evaluate your fleet, your facilities, your processes and partners. Then make certain that you have the last mile solutions you need in your technology stack to successfully carry out your plan and scale it no matter what the future brings.

Want More Cost Optimization Tips? Read The Last Mile Cost Reduction Playbook: