President Trump has taken a break from favorite targets like Little Rocket Man to turn his Twitter fire and ire on the U.S. Postal Service, blasting the agency for not charging enough on parcel delivery, in particular singling out major client Amazon, as the USPS continues to hemorrhage cash.
FedEx reported Tuesday it is on track in terms of holiday shipments, and UPS reported it has been able to keep up after a hiccup following a larger-than-expected volume surge after Cyber Week.
The U.S. Postal Service’s Parcel Select service bested UPS and FedEx in terms of on-time delivery for the week of Dec. 2-9, according to data from ShipMatrix, hitting the mark 99% of the time, while FedEx Ground was second at 97.1% and UPS trailed at 91.5%.
While two-thirds of small-to-medium-sized ecommerce companies offer free shipping, only 3% of them are offering same-day or next-day shipping, as the economics don’t work for smaller online merchants, according to a new survey by Shippo.
As happened with UPS but on a smaller scale, Canada Post customers have experienced issues with late deliveries this week as the national carrier has been impacted by residual effect of Cyber Week volume.
Looking to make up ground on rivals UPS and FedEx during peak season, DHL is in the midst of an expansion effort that includes hiring 6,000 temporary workers across its four business units in North America, adding flights and piloting robotic and augmented reality technologies.
Just ahead of the holidays, the U.S. Postal Service is testing a new program that offers major retailers Sunday delivery for orders placed on Saturday, a service mostly involving Amazon shipments until now.
With an estimated $3 billion left on the table each year in unclaimed refunds from major carriers for errors such as late or wrong deliveries, a software company has figured out how to automate the claims process and win some of that money back for its shipper clients.
Effective Dec. 24 (yes, you read that correctly), rates for UPS Ground, UPS Air and International services as well as UPS Air Freight rates within and between the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico will increase an average of 4.9%. Here’s an analysis of UPS’s changes and the impact they will have on parcel shippers.
Jeff Bezos and the innovation teams at Amazon seem to have cornered the market on far-out ideas that push the envelope for ecommerce distribution, from delivery drones to blimp warehouses to even an undersea DC. That is, until Elon Musk and his hardy band of rocketeers at SpaceX came along and shot the moon – or Mars.