Black Friday 2017 is expected to be the biggest day of spending in the UK (and the world) and falling on November 24th is now just one month away. Big retailers, shops and online stores are offering huge deals that start even from the beginning of November announcing the start of pre-Christmas shopping season.
While Black Friday is still famous for generating large crowds and chaos in-stores online shopping is continuing to grow at a fast rate and people are getting more comfortable with staying at home and browsing the best sales online. Increasingly the best deals, and the most shoppers, are online.
Last year Black Friday online shopping was a record-breaking day surpassing the £2.5 billion mark in the United States alone, showing a 21.6 percent growth per year according to e-commerce transactions reports from Adobe.
Approximately 87% of U.K. consumers have bought at least one product online in the last 12 months , and the United Kingdom is second only to Norway for making e-commerce purchases in Europe. Across the world China and the United States are the biggest online buyers, but other countries are catching up.
Each year the amount of shopping happening during Black Friday sales breaks records of previous years and online shopping growth is making the last two months of the year very crucial for delivery companies. The period accounts for 40 per cent of all parcel deliveries in the UK, with peaks reaching up to 30 million deliveries per day. The number of parcels related to Black Friday purchases are increasing yearly and November 2016 figures represented 27.6 percent of total Non-Food online sales in UK.
People are however getting frustrated by buying online, as delivery problems, delays and lost packages were evident during the past year with around a third of British online shoppers having noted problems with the delivery of their orders during the pre-Christmas period. Logistics experts report that around 10 percent of online orders are not delivered during Black Friday peak.
There are many reasons that can cause the loss of a parcel especially during these critical times of the year. One of the big challenges that delivery companies have to face is the implementation of logistic solutions that allow them to meet the huge demand for online orders. One of these solutions is to hire extra labour for short periods, including postal workers and delivery men who often lack experience in the mailing industry. Dealing with lost, miss delivered or damaged packages becomes an extremely time and cost sensitive process, especially during the peak season. The resources needed to service these complaints and re-deliveries are only part of the cost. With no information on how and where failures are occurring the problem can only be rectified but not fixed for future deliveries. Meaning the same failures are likely to happen over and over.
The increased use of technology in the logistics industry has lead to varying ideas on how to increase efficiency, especially during peak seasons. The boom of the Internet of Things and increasing availability of sensors has lead to solutions such as ParceLive hitting the market. ParceLive offers a unique model providing data as a service to customers on a global scale. With a varied array of sensors and connected via the first mobile network for logistics users are able to ensure complete transparency across their network irrespective of the carrier or country. Tracking location with GPS accuracy as well as live data on shipment security and condition ParceLive provides each parcel with its very own customer service agent reporting back on itself in real time.
While ensuring the safe delivery of a parcel is important to the receiver, more important to delivery companies is the smooth running of their entire network. By engaging with a global and scalable solution such as ParceLive those in the industry are able to take the data from individual shipments and use it to gain invaluable and never before available data on their world. During busy periods such as Black Friday it is now possible to know where items are likely to get lost, where they are getting held up and where they might get damaged. Taking this information straight from the field and implementing it straight back into operations will become an essential part of life in the business of logistics for years to come.
In order to ensure the successful implementation of ParceLive into delivery networks Hanhaa has established a complete program of on-boarding combining all of the tools and support needed for launch. For more information, and to take the first steps to complete network efficiency, click the link below and get on board.
