We are a high-volume shipper. Our limits were per-account, not per-location nor would drop-offs be accepted and treated in any way differently.
I suppose that we could ship as much as we wanted paying over-the-counter full-retail rates, just like anyone else could.
In contrast to the retailers stories in the article, these limits were not a surprise to us. We’ve been planning for months to accommodate this and I think our main carrier (UPS) did a great job of communicating, even as things were somewhat being defined.
That changes things. I know that DHL express is doing this all the time during Q4. Until now I thought it to be a pickup issue. Now that is more like a general capacity issue. Do these limits impact your overall shipping capacity or do you manage regardless?
That's treading towards company confidential data, so I'll just say that it did represent a serious threat to overall capacity but that we have been able to navigate well enough by using a variety of tactics (including demand shaping, negotiating with carriers, and tweaking some of our fitness functions for fulfillment scheduling [to ensure we never/rarely wasted our carrier parcel allocation, even if it might be slightly cheaper to fulfill an order a different way if we had infinite outbound parcel capacity]).
Thanks for answering anyway! And already kudos for a nice job. I just hope I didn't jinx your Q4 now... Part of me wished to have an ops role in 2020, another part is happy I don't. Not sure which one is stronger, so!
I suppose that we could ship as much as we wanted paying over-the-counter full-retail rates, just like anyone else could.
In contrast to the retailers stories in the article, these limits were not a surprise to us. We’ve been planning for months to accommodate this and I think our main carrier (UPS) did a great job of communicating, even as things were somewhat being defined.