P2P is pleased to share this insightful article from our new partner, ProShip, exploring how brands can prepare for the 2025 peak shipping season. 📦 With costs climbing, capacity tightening, and customer expectations higher than ever, the rules of peak have changed. This piece dives into how smart data, flexible carrier strategies, and the right partnerships can help brands stay agile and profitable. No matter what ship happens™.
AUTHORED BY: ProShip Shipping Experts
Every year, peak season puts supply chains to the ultimate test. As the 2025 holiday rush approaches, e-commerce brands are bracing for one of the most complex and unpredictable peak seasons to date. Parcel volumes handled by U.S. delivery companies are forecasted to exceed 2.3 billion packages, a 5% increase from last year. At the same time, carriers are already preparing to roll out temporary surcharges well into the new year.
However, uncertainty still looms as macroeconomic factors like rising tariffs, changes to the de minimis rule, and more cautious consumer spending could impact demand and make it harder to forecast volume. Additionally, if volume underperforms, national carriers may look to offset revenue gaps by raising rates or extending surcharges, increasing the pressure on shippers already struggling to maintain their margins.
With this amount of uncertainty, brands must prepare for two different outcomes at once: a surge in demand and a slump that further constricts budgets. Success will come to those who can remain agile and find a balance between cost, capacity, and customer expectations.
The good news? Even though peak has already begun to ramp up, there is still time for brands to take action. This blog will break down how with the right technology and strategies in place, shippers can protect margins, minimize disruption, and safeguard customer experience.
Balancing Costs
Managing shipping costs has become increasingly challenging, especially in an environment of climbing surcharges and fluctuating consumer demand. Building flexibility into your logistics strategy is key. Shippers who come out ahead of this peak season may not be spending less but have the flexibility to quickly pivot in response to changing conditions. Here are some strategies to help you balance costs for the holiday season:
Revisit Last Year’s Peak Playbook
The best way to identify areas for improvement is by looking back at last year’s performance data. Start by auditing things like sales trends, conversion rates, inventory gaps, and logistics delays. Did your shipping costs align with contracted rates? Were there late delivery fees or unexpected surcharges that swallowed your margins?
Take it a step further by layering parcel-level data (PLD) with advanced analytics, industry benchmarks, and machine learning to build a better strategy for optimizing carrier mix and accurately planning inventory. Point2Point is a key partner when it comes to leveraging PLD and market signals into actionable insights, helping brands translate data into actionable savings and stronger performance. A clear view of where you fell short last year is the first step to tightening cost management.
Optimize Cost Levers you Already Control
By the time peak hits, enterprise shippers typically don’t have the flexibility to renegotiate carrier agreements. Additionally, many brands apply a code freeze during this time so regional carriers can’t be added. Instead, the opportunity to improve cost control lies in how you manage existing contracts, carriers, and workflows.
By leveraging your current agreements, you can shift volume strategically across carriers based on factors like performance, cost, and capacity. Using advanced MCSS solutions like ProShip allow brands to automatically select the most cost-effective carrier for each shipment, ensuring you stay within negotiated terms.
By partnering with an asset-light carrier like P2P, shippers can gain access to additional routing options and alternative delivery solutions when national carrier networks are overloaded. Together, ProShip and P2P help brands unlock cost savings and maximize efficiency when flexibility may be limited.
Strengthen International Readiness
If you ship internationally, the stakes are even higher. Rising tariffs, de minimis changes, and fluctuating exchange rates can all derail your peak operations, and even one misclassified product can cost tens of thousands and cause delays.
Advanced technology like multi-carrier shipping software (MCSS) helps automate documentation, adhere to compliance, and apply tailored business rules to keep shipments moving efficiently. Paired with P2P’s customs experience (including Type 11 clearance and FDA support), brands can stay compliant and avoid costly disruptions.
Balancing cost during peak season is achieved with operational agility, optimizing existing contracts, and leveraging the right technology for smarter decisions. Brands who find this balance not only find success in peak season but position themselves for stronger margins year-round.
Managing Capacity
The holiday surge can put significant pressure on fulfillment networks. Carrier capacity fills quickly, warehouses drown in high order volumes, and any inefficiencies in labor or tools can create bottlenecks that slow operations and increase costs. To effectively manage capacity increases, shippers must plan accordingly and consider the following:
Build a Diversified Carrier Network
We are already experiencing market disruptions that put a strain on capacity such as trade tensions, labor shortages, and natural disasters. Shippers can mitigate these disruptions by confirming capacity thresholds with their existing carriers while also integrating additional carriers as options pre-peak season.
Agile brands partner with asset-light providers and MCSS platforms, enabling them with flexibility to shift volume quickly and seamlessly among carriers. This helps reduce carrier dependency, reduce surcharges, and protect against capacity constraints.
Use Data-Driven Capacity Planning
The pressures of peak season can turn even the smallest error into a major delay or significant cost. By using historical trends and real-time data, brands can better forecast labor, inventory, and fulfillment. Doing so will help you allocate staff and resources more accurately, plan for capacity shortages, and prevent operational bottlenecks.
Coordinate with Partners
Having clear visibility across your network is crucial at all times, but especially during peak when capacity is limited. By maintaining clear communication with your carrier partners, third-party logistics (3PL) providers, and technology vendors, brands are better positioned to monitor capacity and make quick adjustments if disruptions occur. Proactive coordination is critical for handling volume surges without experiencing delays and ensuring delivery promises are met.
Shippers can lessen the stress of peak season capacity by diversifying their transportation mix, leveraging data to plan, and staying aligned with partners. This helps brands control costs, keep customers satisfied, and maintain smooth operations even when resources are stretched thin.
Meeting Customer Expectations
Managing operational costs and capacity aren’t the only challenges the peak holiday season brings. Meeting the expectations of your customers is just as important and complex. With the rise in e commerce over the last several years, consumer expectations have changed significantly, demanding fast, reliable, and transparent delivery experiences. Brands that fall short of meeting these expectations risk losing customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and a positive brand reputation. To ensure customer satisfaction during peak, shippers should consider the following strategies:
Provide Clear and Timely Communication
One of the most critical factors impacting the customer experience is transparent communication. During the holiday season, many consumers are making several purchases from various brands in a short period of time, underscoring the importance of order visibility. By accurately communicating shipping timelines at checkout and providing estimated delivery windows based on real-time carrier data, brands can better align their delivery promises with available capacity. Tools like internal PRFAQs (Press Release + FAQ) can align teams on what’s promised, what’s possible, and how to communicate clearly.
Automated notifications, tracking alerts, and proactive communication give customers clear visibility into their orders. Timely updates on delays or disruptions prevent surprises and reduce friction, while keeping shoppers informed about when their packages will arrive. This transparency not only helps manage expectations and build trust but can also reduce issues like porch piracy. Partners like P2P consolidate real-time carrier updates into a single, actionable view, making it easier for brands to adjust mid-season and maintain a seamless delivery experience.
Strengthen Returns and Exchange Programs
With a surge in peak season order volumes, an increase in returns is sure to follow. Holiday season return rates are predicted to reach a 17% increase on average over annual return rates. Just last year, the retail industry projected to reach $890 billion in returns. Without an efficient, flexible, and simple reverse logistics program in place, returns can drain profits and frustrate customers.
Brands can benefit by looking for partners who provide routing intelligence, inspection automation, and flexible return options. P2P can integrate these capabilities into a single API connection, streamlining the customer experience and maintaining cost control.
The combination of proactive communication, strong fulfillment strategies, and efficient return programs can help shippers transform the customer experience and protect brand loyalty even during high-volume peak periods.
How MCSS Supports Peak Readiness
Finding an efficient balance between cost, capacity, and customer experience during the busiest time of the year is undeniably difficult. However, advanced technology is the backbone that makes this balance achievable at scale. ProShip’s industry leading multi-carrier shipping software helps enterprise shippers seamlessly integrate carriers, connect to your existing technology stacks, and provide crucial data, giving teams the visibility and flexibility they need to achieve peak season success.
Together, ProShip and P2P enable shippers to turn peak planning into action, supporting end-to-end operations with:
Real-time carrier rate shopping: ProShip’s automated rate shopping technology enables shippers to compare rates across available carriers, including P2P, to select the optimal service for each shipment based on pre-defined criteria such as cost, transit time, carrier performance, and more.
Unified visibility across shipments: Whether shipping domestically or internationally, ProShip enables transparent tracking across carriers from a single interface, allowing shippers to monitor exceptions and gain real-time insights into potential disruptions before they occur.
Seamless system integration: ProShip connects with your existing warehouse management system (WMS), order management system (OMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and other pieces of the enterprise software stack (ESS). By leveraging ProShip’s integration with P2P, shippers gain access to P2P’s cutting-edge domestic and cross-border shipping services.
Data-driven insights for proactive decision-making: ProShip provides clean, centralized, and actionable shipping data while seamlessly integrating with top-tier business intelligence and analytics tools. This allows brands clear visibility into performance and the ability to make real-time adjustments to cost, capacity, and service strategies during peak.
Scalable automation and operational flexibility: ProShip automates workflows such as label generation and carrier updates as well as enables shippers to configure custom business rules to their unique needs. Combined with P2P’s capacity and routing options, this pair scales seamlessly as your brand grows, empowering shippers to handle peak demand efficiently.
By combining ProShip’s advanced MCSS and Point2Point’s innovative e-commerce logistics solutions, brands can achieve the flexibility to control costs, adapt to shifting capacity, and deliver reliable experiences to their customers. Together, they transform peak season chaos into strategic opportunities.
Turning Peak Complexity into Peak Performance
As we enter the 2025 peak season, it is crucial that shippers have the right mindset: it isn’t just about handling more parcels. It’s about managing uncertainty. Success will come to those who prioritize flexibility, proactive planning, and partnerships that help balance cost, capacity, and customer expectations.
About ProShip
ProShip, the industry-leading multi-carrier shipping software solution, allows high-volume enterprise shippers to automate carrier service optimization (rate shopping), and easily build and manage complex business rules all within one carrier-agnostic system. ProShip seamlessly integrates with your existing WMS, OMS, ERP systems, and other automation processes, scaling as your business grows. With both on-platform and private cloud hosting deployment options, ProShip empowers enterprise shippers to streamline complex workflows, maintain carrier compliance, decrease IT dependency through continuous updates, and find a quick ROI. Trusted by leading brands, ProShip is the last shipping software you’ll ever need. Visit www.proshipinc.com to learn more.
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