Between mid-November and late January have always a terrible time of the year for online retailers in Australia.
All brands tend to cop a plenty of customer complaints over slow freight timeframes. It's been the same for the last 16 years.
Despite our lightning fast order processing speed that can prepare your order in minutes, some years are a complete nightmare with freight services across Australia congested and choked.
The problems are not confined to AusPost.
There are only a handful of residential freight providers and all of them suffer a similar fate with delivery delays that time of year.
Freight networks are a series of large pipes that everybody uses - it's the same network and no merchant has special access, faster methods or ways to make problems disappear.
The annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events are a primary reason why the parcel networks clog so badly.
It's essentially the timing - right when most people are also thinking about their Xmas gift shopping, so you tend to see a quantum increase in freight volumes.
The lead up to Xmas is also a time when some consumers become more anxious about their purchases arriving.
Some might be taking early holidays to avoid the Xmas/New Year peak holiday season and having their orders arrive promptly is important.
From mid-December to late January is when the freight companies have less staff available to work.
This causes slower transit times as the parcel centers have more of their resources away on leave.
It's only really at the beginning of February when things return to normal.
What can you do about it.
Honestly, not much except be patient and plan for transit delays. Being aware of the impact of peak season upon the delivery timeframe will help deal with any unreasonable expectations.
You simply can't assume that freight networks are scalable to cope with extreme volumes, it does not work the same as other periods of the year.
Expecting a parcel to arrive in 1 or 2 days at the start of December might be unrealistic.
What we are doing about it.
There is not a lot we can do at our end to bypass freight congestion.
One of the key differentiators due to our large size is direct lodgement from our premises straight into a distribution centre where parcels are routed immediately instead of being stored and waiting for sortation.
We can generally shave off 1 to 3 days depending upon the level of congestion in the networks.
The other stuff we do is common sense such as all our parcels packed into brand new custom-made and sized cartons.
We also use computer generated consignment labels and we have exemplary freight processes right up to moment we delicately load by hand each one of our hundreds of parcels into the collection vehicle each day.
That's right, our staff load the vehicles, so we take super-care of each parcel.
It is a benchmark for parcel handling and the best available solution we can imagine - leaving absolutely nothing to chance.
Offering more shipping choices is not the answer unfortunately. Between 2017 and 2022 we offered the 3 main residential freight providers - AusPost, Couriers Please and Fastway/Aramex.
After 5 years of trying hard to get Couriers Please and Fastway to perform consistently, we had to stop using their services as the incident rate was a monster 1200% higher than AusPost. No lie or exaggeration.
With more than 1 million shipments, we have the deep experience to know what it takes to get your parcel delivered properly.
