Monday, Dec. 15 is expected to be the peak holiday shipping volume day for both FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service, with UPS projecting the following Monday, Dec. 22, to be its largest shipping day this holiday season.
The USPS is estimating 640 million cards, letters and packages will be delivered today, up from 607 million on Dec. 16, 2013. “We are ready for the rush and ready to deliver,” said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. The USPS is delivering seven days a week in major cities and high volume areas, including on Christmas Day.
For FedEx, the company is expecting to ship 22.6 million packages today, more than twice the volume on a typical day, and up from 22 million packages on the 2013 peak day of Dec. 2. The company is projecting it will handle more than 290 million shipments between Black Friday and Christmas Eve, an 8.8% increase from 2013.
“Our team members are energized and well prepared, and excited to deliver joy this holiday season,” said FedEx spokesperson Katie Wassmer.
UPS is projecting total shipping volume of 34 million packages on Dec. 22, twice its standard daily volume. In all, UPS estimates it will handle 585 million packages in December, up 11% from 2013.
“The plans UPS put in place involved a tremendous amount of collaboration with our large retail shippers that is now being executed, and we have ongoing dialog with our customers,” said UPS spokesperson Susan Rosenberg. “Coming through Thanksgiving and Cyber Week, we’ve met the volume increases that had been part of our planning.”
In all, UPS invested nearly $1 billion in technology, facilities and manpower in 2014 to increase its network capacity and avoid another nightmare scenario this holiday season. FedEx is investing $1.2 billion in its ground network in the current fiscal year, with most of that going to increase capacity and automation. The company said the improvements have sped up ground delivery by a day or more in more than two-thirds of the U.S.
In 2013, about 2 million packages handled by the two major carriers weren’t delivered by Christmas, an estimated 1.3 million from UPS and 630,000 from FedEx, according to shipment tracking software company ShipMatrix. Satish Jindel, president of ShipMatrix, said only 30% of those failures involved guaranteed delivery dates, with the fault lying outside the carriers 70% of the time. Weather, network issues and massive last-minute ecommerce orders were blamed.
According to ShipMatrix, FedEx achieved on-time delivery service 96% of the time during Cyber Week (Dec. 1-5), up from 94% in 2013. For the same week, UPS attained on-time performance of 97%, up from 93% in the prior year. This includes both express and ground services, based on millions of packages shipped by ShipMatrix customers.Jindel cited the changes and upgrades as reason for the improved performance.