Singles’ Day Deliveries: How Retailers Can Ensure No Love-Loss with Customers 

For the unattached ones across the globe, Singles’ Day is the day to spoil one’s own self-gifts, and why not? You are doing great, working hard, shouldering responsibilities,  paying your own bills, and whatnot. Buy yourself a good watch, those fancy jeans, a Ray-Ban aviator, or that handbag you have been waiting to buy for the past six months. 

While singles shop, it’s a retailer’s responsibility to guarantee delightful deliveries that are on time, cost-efficient, and absolutely transparent. The “Singles’ Day” shopping event generated a sales volume of USD 2.5 bn on Alibaba within the first nine hours! While the event mainly concerns China, it has assumed a global stance owing to cultural intermingling and globalization of cross-border commerce.

Before we share how retailers can scale their delivery operations to cater to this huge seasonal shopping surge, here are some numbers and insights from previous years.

In 2021, Singles’ Day, which is celebrated on November 11 every year, was celebrated for 11 days, and Alibaba and JD.com recorded a sales revenue of around USD 139 billion across their platforms. The shares of JD.com went up by 4.6 during the afternoon, and Alibaba’s GMV (gross merchandise volume) went 8%+ up as compared to 2020, which is almost seven times the global GMV of Amazon Prime Day.

For logistics, this intense peak in online shopping came with jaw-dropping numbers shown below:

• 1.16 billion packages were transported in China in 2021 on Singles’ Day.
• China is the second largest importing country in the world, with a trade value of 3.2 trillion CNY.
• DB Schenker started experiencing the logistics rush 2 months before the Singles’ Day and processed 2 million online orders within a 24-hour period.

To tackle this mammoth rush of millions of shipments in a single day and to ensure the sourcing, routing, and delivery of cross-border shipments without breaching the ETA SLAs and losing a package is no easy feat.

Hence, we share 4 strategic tips for businesses to scale their deliveries for the Singles’ Day shopping fest.

4 Ways Businesses Can Prepare for Delivery Rush on Singles’ Day

Seamless Delivery Orchestration For Greater Agility

Leveraging a smart logistics management platform, retailers can automatically and efficiently allocate delivery tasks to their own riders and 3PLs based on multiple business needs like customer SLA, delivery type, volume, vehicle make, proximity, rider availability, and more. Such a platform maximizes the utilization of resources in the most optimal manner and improves the delivery process via smart order clubbing, dynamic routing, multi-stop deliveries, and real-time ETA visibility.

Partnering with Multiple 3PL Carriers To Boost Serviceability 

Partnering with multiple 3PL carriers and logistics service providers can help businesses seize the opportunities introduced by skyrocketing demands of online deliveries. They can move beyond the standard 3-4 days deliveries as well and cater to the much larger audience of same-day or few hours deliveries.

Onboarding multiple carrier partners also help increase a business’s serviceability, exercise more reliable deliveries, and cost-efficient management of elastic demands. Businesses can avail of multiple other benefits like freelance riders, floating fleets, and resource optimization without having to actually participate in core planning.

Smart Trapping of Last Mile Delivery Issues To Shrink Costs 

Among the chaos of high delivery rush and busy logistics companies, it is highly likely for a rider to mark fake delivery attempts, parcel loss, damage, or address incorrect issues. Such issues will not only cost a brand its customers but also add to the operational losses.

Fake delivery attempts, delivery re-attempts, and frauds are also highly likely. Businesses can trap them by implementing smart delivery orchestration solutions that validate and authenticate all the reasons marked by a driver with the end customer as well. Geo-fencing driver locations to the delivery addresses and conveying dynamic ETAs to the customer for effortless deliveries can also help in tackling these issues.

Logistics Automation For Greater SLA Adherence 

Optimization by off-the-shelf software tools, such as basic routing, order management tools, etc., leaves room for inefficiencies and errors and offers partial visibility over the movements. 

End-to-end automation, on the other hand, offers granular insight into the leg-to-leg shipment movement and helps optimize the hidden loopholes for the most profitable delivery orchestration. Granular visibility helps businesses plan highly optimized deliveries while keeping multiple constraints in mind, such as vehicle capacity (for maximum deliveries in one trip) and most optimal routing (where parameters for route optimization can vary depending on order, etc.).

Store or warehouse managers can geo-fence the riders to the warehouse/store to start order allocation even before they arrive at the pickup point and enforce highly optimized deliveries. 

Drive Delightful Delivery Experiences This Single’s Day

Getting all these advanced functionalities from legacy systems or off-the-shelf software tools is neither possible nor advisable. This is because these tools fail to offer an integrated view of the entire supply chain for centralized management and control of delivery operations.

Custom SaaS automation, like Shipsy, not only overcomes these challenges but also helps make deliveries highly cost-efficient, controllable, optimized, and effortless. Businesses can integrate the platform with their existing ERP/CRM/WMS/OMS systems and get real-time alerts for any event. They can share real-time tracking information and shipment data with the end customers and amplify their customer experience as well.

So, follow the tips shared here to ensure more smiles during the Single’s Day shopping frenzy.