Adverse winter weather impacts some Cyber Week delivery on-time rates, says ShipMatrix

Major parcel carriers delivery operations, for UPS, FedEx, the United States Postal Service (USPS), and global e-commerce titan Amazon, over Cyber Monday Week, were impacted by harsh weather conditions in various parts of the United States, according to data issued this week by ShipMatrix, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh-based SJ Consulting. 

ShipMatrix reported that these respective carriers delivered roughly 80 million parcels per day during Cyber Monday week, which represents a more than 50% increase in average daily package deliveries compared to other times of the year. And with the adverse weather conditions in some U.S. regions, ShipMatrix said it resulted in the carriers’ collective ability to maintain delivery commitments. 

Looking at the individual carrier performances for the week ending December 7, ShipMatrix reported on-time delivery for UPS at 92.7, with FedEx at 90.4%, USPS at 92.3%, and Amazon (primarily through its last mile delivery services) at 93.7%. The firm added that consumers in New England states dealt with roughly 20% of their deliveries coming later than expected, due to weather conditions.

ShipMatrix said that based on its research, Amazon customers may also be experiencing greater delays in delivery of their orders for various reasons, including: delays in the fulfillment of the order, misunderstanding about the cut of time to receive next day delivery and certain products still having a two day delivery promise.

And it also observed that as Amazon Logistics has expanded its delivery capabilities by 127% annually from 2018 to 2019, “it is faced with additional challenges in getting all the parcels on the vans making the last mile delivery.”

SJ Consulting Satish Jindel told LM that this most recent batch of data shows how with more and more online shopping happening, volumes have been spread out and carriers have been stretched in handling it.

“Even though bad weather only happened in part of the country, it does snowball resources everywhere else,” Jindel said in an interview. “And if the weather stays good for the rest of this week and the next few days, [the carrier delivery] networks  will recover from it.”

As for Amazon, Jindel said it is likely issues are going to persist for a while because they are not weather-related

“Some of it is related to their facilities and service centers receiving packages, and being able to sort them and get them to the drivers to go out to deliver,” he said. “They are sending people to help, and that will take a few more days. There is also a perception issue, in that consumers have a misunderstanding of when a package is late and when it is not. If you order something at 10 p.m. and think ‘next-day’ means tomorrow…no, it does not mean tomorrow. Not everything is consolidated for next day, some things are still on a two-day basis. That is because some items are being shipped by merchants who don’t have a service commitment.”