5 Ways to Effectively Manage Ecommerce Shipping Delays

More than two-thirds of customers have experienced at least one delayed delivery in their past six months of online shopping, according to a report by Körber. While shipment delays are a common experience, they do not go unnoticed by buyers and can harm your brand’s reputation and overall revenue.

Let’s uncover the biggest reasons for ecommerce shipping delays, how they negatively impact customers and retailers, and how to manage them in an efficient manner.

What are the most common shipping delay reasons in ecommerce?

Shipping delays affect both buyers and vendors on a significant scale. According to an S&P Global study, issues like low water levels in the Panama Canal and rebel attacks in the Red Sea forced ships to reroute in 2024, adding up to two weeks to shipping operations times. 

As of July 2024, shipment delays have surged to nearly four times the usual average, still below COVID peaks but significantly impacting delivery times — levels not seen in 15 years before the pandemic.

Beyond these global factors, operational inefficiencies play a large role in extending delivery times. Understanding these four shipping delay reasons helps businesses to prevent them:

Transportation issues

Problems with transport are among the most common reasons for delays on delivery. Inaccessible routes, natural disasters, bad weather, or other macro-environmental changes cause disruptions that lead to missed deadlines. 

But the main causes of supply chain issues related to freight carriage normally are:

• Holidays: During peak seasons like Black Friday or Christmas, the combination of limited carrier capacity and increased demand results in bottlenecks, making it difficult to fulfill orders on time. 

• Labor shortages: 37% of logistics organizations are experiencing high labor shortages, and 61% indicated that transportation operations suffer the most from this understaffing, per Descartes research. This workforce gap reduces the efficiency of warehousing and customer support affairs, leaving businesses struggling to meet delivery standards.

Explore how Shipium’s Injection Shipping can help boost your peak season operations.

Inaccurate shipping information

When customers misspell their addresses, or retailers don’t document orders properly, packages may be late or, worse, not delivered at all. Validating addresses before the order reaches fulfillment centers helps you fix any inaccuracy beforehand. 

Platforms like Shipium cross-check entered addresses at checkout and compare them to official databases, like USPS. This process ensures every detail — street name, city, ZIP code — is up to date before you can route orders.

See how Shipium’s Address Validation API can help ensure the deliverability of your packages before picking and packing.

Technology gaps

Many ecommerce businesses rely on legacy systems that don’t provide real-time tracking or automation, making it difficult to prevent or react to issues causing delayed shipments.

For instance, overestimating demand without the infrastructure to support it leads to bottlenecks. Meanwhile, underestimating demand can leave your business scrambling to restock.

Lost or damaged packages

Shipping issues such as damage, loss, or theft can happen at any point in the supply chain. For instance, packages that are not adequately protected may suffer harm during extreme weather conditions like rain or snow. Multi-stop shipping processes, where freight is loaded and unloaded multiple times, can also increase the risk of boxes and items breakage.

Another growing issue is the phenomenon of “porch piracy” — the stealing of deliveries left unattended on customers’ doorsteps. Research shows that one-quarter of American adults have had a package stolen in their lives. Homes without surveillance or secure delivery options are especially vulnerable, particularly in urban and suburban neighborhoods. 

Ecommerce businesses can mitigate this issue by offering alternative delivery options such as parcel lockers, in-store pickups, or requiring signatures upon delivery to ensure packages are not left unattended.

How shipping delays can impact your business

The cost of late delivery extends far beyond unhappy customers. The impact on your bottom line includes:

• Higher operational costs: Businesses are forced to spend more on appeasements such as refunds, discounts, or expedited replacements to compensate for not accomplishing customer expectations. Additional costs arise from overtime labor to address backlogged orders or rerouting shipments to meet shipping times. 

• Support team overload: When a delayed shipment occurs, customer service teams have to handle complaints, track packages, and coordinate resolutions. This high workload diverts valuable resources from proactive customer engagement to reactive issue management, straining teams and reducing efficiency.

• Brand reputation damage: Negative reviews and social media complaints about delays in shipping can wear out customers’ trust. Brands that consistently fail to deliver on time risk losing their competitive edge, particularly as shoppers increasingly favor businesses that prioritize reliable and fast shipping.

How to prevent shipment delays before they occur

Delays may seem inevitable with all types of possible supply chain disruptions, but there are ways to manage and prevent them — both upstream and downstream. Follow these five best practices to minimize ecommerce shipping delays before they occur:

1. Implement strategic inventory placement

Where your inventory is located plays a critical role in delivery speed. By strategically placing items closer to customers, you reduce transit times, decrease shipping costs, and prevent delays caused by last mile delivery challenges. 

Advanced tech solutions leverage data-driven insights to help businesses determine optimal locations, ensuring that stock is always where it is needed most. Shipium’s platform, for instance, improves your inventory management process by informing the best allocation decision for products at the SKU level. 

2. Improve stock management

When items are out of stock or misplaced within the warehouse, delays in fulfilling orders happen more often. For effective stock practices, implement a warehouse management system (WMS) to get real-time visibility into inventory levels, ensuring accurate stock counts and location tracking. 

3. Automate your picking systems

Manual picking processes cause errors and inefficiencies, slowing down your order fulfillment process. Implementing automated picking systems like robotics or pick-to-light technology accelerates this process and reduces the risk of shipping delays.

Automation also enables warehouses to scale operations during peak periods, keeping up with increased demand without compromising efficiency.

4. Leverage predictive analytics tools

Use historical data and real-time insights to forecast demand and identify potential bottlenecks before they occur. By planning inventory replenishment, staffing, and carrier capacity ahead of time, you can navigate high-pressure periods such as holidays with more confidence.

Discover how predictive analytics drives better supply chain decisions.

5. Broaden your carrier network

Relying on just a few carriers increases vulnerability to delays caused by capacity issues, strikes, or overall disruptions. Diversifying your network helps your shipments continue to move even during unforeseen challenges. 

With Shipium’s pre-integrated carrier network, you easily switch between carriers to maintain on-time delivery performance while optimizing for cost and efficiency.

How to address delayed delivery issues when they arise

If you’ve done the work to prevent delayed shipments, but unexpected errors still happen in your supply chain, here’s how you can address late deliveries:

1. Create clear escalation processes: Define structured pathways and contingency plans for resolving shipping issues by establishing triggers, assigning ownership, and setting resolution timelines for your team. Creating documented processes for these critical situations helps you resolve them more quickly whenever a problem emerges.
2. Communicate delivery delays proactively: Set up automatic status updates and notify buyers immediately when a delay is identified. You can send emails or SMS texts, but the important thing to remember is that communication leads to a better customer experience — building trust and reducing complaints. 
3. Offer free shipping or other alternatives: Consider the possibility of providing refunds, discounts, expedited, or free shipping on future orders. This gesture helps retain customers and increase their lifetime value (LTV) despite any delay in shipping.

Reduce late deliveries with Shipium

Shipium is the right technology partner if you are looking for ways to minimize late deliveries. Our API-first platform connects with your existing systems to optimize the supply chain and help you keep delivery date promises to customers. With Shipium, you get:

• Advanced inventory placement: Our platform optimizes the selection of inventory locations by analyzing demand patterns, shipping process costs, and delivery speed requirements. Shipium provides data-driven recommendations on where to position stock across your network, making sure products are always closer to customers.
• Automated carrier selection: Our platform evaluates each shipment’s specific needs, such as cost, speed, and reliability. By doing so, Shipium dynamically matches shipments with the best carrier option, reducing transit risks and guaranteeing on-time delivery.
• Reliable delivery promises: Using predictive algorithms, Shipium ensures customers receive accurate and realistic delivery promises at checkout. By factoring in inventory location, carrier performance, and transit times, our platform helps you set achievable expectations, reducing the risk of customer dissatisfaction caused by late deliveries.

Minimizing delivery issues is not just about addressing delays — it’s about setting the right expectations from the start. Request a demo today and see how Shipium’s carrier management solutions help avoid costly ecommerce shipping delays.