COVID & Shipping Delays

You have to move your guaranteed delivery by holidays for sure, but most of the holiday shopping is earlier this year now.  If you haven’t already bumped up marketing, you’re behind.  You also need to be adding shipping insurance.  Customer facing is my favorite and I use it all my ecomm brands.  Offering options for digital gifts to complement the real thing, in case of delay is a great way for someone to have something to gift in the event of a shipping delay out of your control.  As the brand, be prepared for upset customers...even if it is on USPS, UPS, FedEx etc, the customer will attack the brand that has their money with poor reviews if there isn’t a strategy in place to empathize and serve those customers.  Email last year’s purchasers alerting them to the need to shop early because of shipping issues.

 Email last year’s purchasers alerting them to the need to shop early because of shipping issues.

This is a great strategy for personalized and helpful customer outreach.  I love it!

We’re actually using COVID shipping delays as an “excuse” for early sales. With some of our partners we did “early sales” at the beginning of November that were very close to Black Friday offer in terms of value, and the premise was

“you know shipping times are going to be crazy around thanksgiving. If you want to get your stuff early, we’re doing an early sale for you.” 

That sale had an expiration date (2-3 days) and worked REALLY well. 

Now we’re going to see how the actual BFCM sale works for those brands in comparison to the early one. Will keep you posted if this is interesting for people! 

@KaseyLuck - definitely keep us posted on how the BFCM compared to the early sale! Also, are the audiences for the early sale and your BFCM sale the same, or did you push to a VIP list for an early sale? And are you promoting similar sale/bundled items? So many questions but it’s great to see what kind of strategy you’ve implemented and what the results were like for the test! Thanks for sharing :) 

Cheers, 
-Cass. 

We’re based in Canada and only ship within Canada.  We’re putting out the message to shop early because of possible delays due to COVID.  If the coming weeks are anything like the months when the pandemic started, there’s going to be huge delays at the carriers.  

The province of Ontario (a large market) just went into a lockdown today (no in-store shopping) until Dec 22.  So, there’s going to be a lot of online shopping to happen for gifting (we’re expecting).