How to be successful with Christmas shipping cutoffs for 2024

Carriers have published their cut-off dates, but what steps do ShipCalm customers need to take to ensure their shipments arrive on time

While there have been many articles that circulate the internet about various carrier shipping cutoffs, it's important to know how those cutoffs impact your customers.  ShipCalm does not proactively upgrade order service levels and will simply ship whatever carrier is provided regardless of the service level and what we know about cutoff dates.  With that in mind, it's really important that you understand a lot about carriers as well as how ShipCalm's SLA Date translates to carrier cutoff dates.

Carriers understanding and how to message your customers

While the carriers publish "Cutoff Dates" there is NO GUARANTEE that even if the order gets on a truck by that cutoff date, it will arrive in time for Christmas.  During this time of year, many shipments go unscanned or get delayed for various reasons, including weather and many other factors.  During peak season industry averages for parcel carriers range between 75-85%.  This means that 2 out of every 10 shipments don't get to the customer within the initial time window that was quoted.

To avoid this, we recommend that you encourage your customers to add extra lead time to their orders on your website by messaging them on your website to make sure they arrive on time.

Lack of Carrier Scans

Regardless of when a carrier picks up an order, you're likely to get many inbound emails and phone calls about tracking numbers that don't show movement.  This is very typical and does not mean that the carrier doesn't have the package.  None of the carriers that pick up from ShipCalm physically scan packages when they pick up the packages as it would take too much time.  The packages need to make their way onto a conveyor belt in a sorting facility or get a final delivery scan somewhere.

One of the key challenges during peak season is that sorting facilities are over-capacity and lean on manual sorting methods with additional staff.  When this happens a package can pass through one or more sortation facilities without ever receiving a scan.

The reliability of scanning varies wildly on carrier and service level.  In some of the lowest-cost solutions during peak season we will see as much as 40% of packages go between 2-5 days without getting scans.  This can include all orders that we ship a given method and given carrier across all of our customers.  In other instances, a package will go "off-grid" for 20 days saying that it was never picked up only to get a delivery scan much later.

Every business will need to develop its own policies for when it wants to consider the package lost and ship another one.

We recommend setting up an email template & policy in your customer service software so that when these inquiries come in you can provide some general details along with the company's policy of how it handles "lost shipments" that show no movement.

ShipCalm SLA Date & Carrier Cutoffs

Understanding how the ShipCalm SLA Date works is important, we encourage you to familiarize yourself with our Order Fulfillment SLA policy.

The most important thing to note is that ShipCalm ships from as early as 5am EST to as late as noon PST on any given day.  Our SLA for parcel orders (most holiday shipments) is simply that the order is marked as "Shipped" in our WMS, that it has a tracking number, and that it is ready to be picked up by the carrier.

This means that many shipments that meet our SLA may not get on the truck that day.  With that in mind, we recommend considering at least 1 extra day of ShipCalm SLA for any carrier cutoff that you're planning for.  Below is a table that shows this recommendation:

ShipCalm SLA Date Carrier Cutoff Date Carriers / Methods
12/12/2024 12/13/2024 FedEx Ground Economy
12/13/2024 12/16/2024 UPS Ground**
UPS Ground SAVER**
12/16/2024 12/17/2024 FedEx Ground
FedEx Home Delivery®
12/17/2024 12/18/2024 USPS Ground Advantage™
USPS First-Class Mail®
12/18/2024 12/19/2024 USPS Priority Mail®
FedEx Express Saver
UPS 3 Day Select®
12/19/2024 12/20/2024 FedEx 2Day & 2Day AM
UPS 2nd Day Air®
12/20/2024 12/21/2024 USPS Priority Mail Express®
12/20/2024 12/23/2024 FedEx FedEx First Overnight®
FedEx Priority Overnight®
FedEx Standard Overnight®
UPS Next Day Air®
12/23/2024 12/24/2024 FedEx SameDay®


** UPS Suggests that you check transit times on any given shipment.  The website to do this is: https://wwwapps.ups.com/ctc/

We DON'T recommend consolidators

You'll notice that we didn't include UPS SurePost, FedEx SmartPost, DHL eCommerce, OSM, or Mail Innovations on the list above.  All of these options are consolidators and much less predictable from door-to-door primary carriers, especially when it comes to holiday cutoffs.  If it's important to get there in time, please consider this regardless of the timing that a consolidator quotes.

Changing / Upgrading the service on orders

If you'd like to change the carriers on your orders we encourage you to do so.  To help with that we've put together the following help article on Updating Carriers on Orders in InfoPlus.

If arriving by Christmas is important to you then we recommend monitoring all of your orders daily to ensure that any orders that aren't marked as Shipped by the end of the day get upgraded to a service level that will increase the likelihood it arrives on time.

Please reach out with questions

If you do have any questions at all, please reach out to support@shipcalm.com or directly to your Hear of Ops here at ShipCalm.