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In a recent piece on Black Friday fulfillment, The Supply Chainer made the case that peak season is getting harder to plan for: promotions run longer, inventory sits closer to customers, and new buying channels make order volume less predictable. I had the pleasure of sharing my two cents on how brands can get ahead of it. What I shared there was part of a bigger conversation about what to lock in before peak season, and I wanted to lay out the full picture here.
This is how I think about Black Friday from the warehouse side: the inventory decisions to make now, how to keep the forecast honest once the sale starts, and the carrier signals I watch when parcel networks tighten.
Black Friday fulfillment, from the floor up
I have run peak season from the warehouse side for over a decade. Here is how I approach it, from inventory timing to carrier monitoring.
Get inventory in a month early, not a week
My rule of thumb is to have peak inventory in the building about a month before Black Friday, and new SKUs even earlier. The hard deadline we ask our clients to hit is the week before. The gap between those two dates is what my team can do with the product once it arrives.
A week is enough time to receive inventory and get it on shelves. A month is enough time to slot it with intent, and for high-SKU-count brands, apparel especially, that is where peak performance gets decided. Not everything that comes in goes to the floor. We have to decide what goes into pickable locations and what goes into overstock, and that decision depends on your forecast. Inventory that lands the week before gets put away. Inventory that lands a month before gets planned.
Slot for the pick path, then spread out the fast movers
Slotting for peak season works in layers. It starts with your forecast. We then categorize SKUs by velocity, A for the fastest movers down to C for the slowest, and place the A SKUs along the pick path to cut the distance pickers travel and keep them close to pack stations.
The part most brands don't expect is that the fast movers can't all go together. When we have thousands of orders to pick across tens of thousands of units, concentrating the A SKUs in one area means every picker is headed to the same aisle, and the aisle becomes the bottleneck. So we spread the fast movers out. It is a different approach from how we slot outside of peak season, and it only works when the inventory is in the building early enough to plan it.
Inbound freight is part of the timing problem
One reason inventory arrives late is that inbound freight is being coordinated with someone else's carrier, with dock appointments bouncing back and forth. We run our own in-house freight brokerage, and I encourage our clients to use it for exactly this reason. When the inbound freight and the receiving dock are managed by the same team, the back-and-forth goes away and inventory lands when it is supposed to.
One forecast is never enough
Most brands send us one peak forecast. Peak season runs two to three weeks, and in my experience the forecast is wrong by the end of day one, in one direction or the other.
The forecast you send in advance is the starting point. What matters is updating it once reality hits. If Black Friday beats the forecast, I need to know what the next two or three days look like. If it falls flat and your marketing team decides to push harder over the weekend, I need to know that too. The failure mode I see most often: volume comes in light on day one, the warehouse trims staffing, then marketing turns up the promotions and the floor gets slammed the next day with no warning.
Reset your shipping promise before Black Friday, not during it
If you guarantee a delivery window on your website, that promise was built on normal transit times. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday week, transit typically picks up a day or two. Decide your shipping strategy for that week ahead of time. Either shift to a faster parcel product to hold the promise, or reset the expectation with your customers before the sale starts.
Multi-location inventory only helps if it is balanced
Brands split inventory across buildings to get closer to customers and cut shipping zones. That benefit disappears if the inventory in each building doesn't match the forecast for the region it serves. A stockout in one building means shipping from a building farther away, which is the opposite of what the strategy was supposed to do: longer transit and higher cost on the orders that matter most.
When demand shifts mid-peak and one building depletes faster than expected, the choices are to move inventory between buildings, accept backorders, or ship from farther away. All three get harder the later you make the call.
What to watch once carriers tighten
Carrier capacity tightens every year during Black Friday week and again in the final push before Christmas cutoffs. Here is what I watch, in order:
- Gaps in scans. If we inducted a truckload the night before and there are no tracking events by morning, that is my first sign of trouble. We call the carrier first to find out whether it is a capacity issue or something else.
- Transit time drift. Actual delivery days versus the average for that lane. This shows up later than scan gaps, but it confirms whether a carrier is falling behind in a specific hub or market.
- Where we are in the calendar. A one- or two-day delay during Black Friday week is something most shoppers expect. The same delay in the week before carrier cutoffs can mean a missed Christmas delivery. Volume shifts between carriers get more urgent, and I get more lenient on the cost analysis, the closer we get to those dates.
On carrier mix: a single-carrier strategy is a risk at any point in the year and a bigger one through peak season. Carrier problems are usually regional, a specific hub rather than the whole network, so the ability to throttle volume across carriers is what keeps a local problem from becoming your problem. For us, that shift is routine rather than an emergency. Most of our clients already ship across several carriers through our proprietary shipping method, so moving volume during peak season is not a new process.
The rest of the picture: how we prepare for peak season
Inventory and carriers are my side of peak season. Earlier this fall, I sat down with the rest of ShipNetwork's leadership team for Clear Voices: Peak Strategy, a recorded conversation on how we prepare across the business. A few points from that discussion build on what I covered above.
Flexibility is the plan. My point on the panel was that the forecast matters, but the ability to adjust is what gets you through. Volumes shift, promotions outperform, inventory arrives late. During peak season, that means comparing the plan to what is actually happening, sometimes hour by hour, and moving people and attention quickly. The rolling forecast I described above is the brand-side half of that.
Preparation is what makes real-time response possible. Paul Tran, our VP of IT, described months of prep before peak: reviewing the prior year, testing integrations, running load simulations. Then the role shifts to monitoring and support, because reality never matches the test exactly. The scan-gap monitoring I described works the same way. You know what to watch because you decided in advance what normal looks like.
Throughput without accuracy is not a win. Carolyn Martin, our VP of Revenue, framed the question brands should ask as "Can we handle the increase without compromising the experience our customers expect?" Order accuracy, processing timelines, inventory accuracy, and communication still have to hold. That is why I slot to reduce congestion as much as I slot for speed.
Carrier strategy is a relationship, not a rate card. Steve Newsome, Warehouse Regional Manager, spent much of his career on the client side managing carrier relationships and contracts. His view lines up with mine: carrier capacity is a shared constraint across the industry, and the brands that come through peak season well are the ones with options already in place.
Peak season planning starts after peak ends. Gina Payton, our Director of Client Services, encouraged brands to commit before peak season to a real review afterward: which problems were one-time events (a sales spike, weather) and which kept showing up (the same communication gap, the same manual workaround). The recurring ones are telling you something.
What ties this together is that none of it is new to us. A dedicated team that knows your SKUs, your peak patterns, and your customers can make these calls quickly because we are not learning your business in November. That is what we mean when we say ShipNetwork is an extension of your brand.
Black Friday fulfillment questions, answered
When should inventory arrive at the warehouse for Black Friday?
Ideally a month before Black Friday, and no later than the week before. A month gives the warehouse time to receive, categorize, and slot inventory along the pick path. A week is enough to get product on shelves but not enough to position it strategically, which limits how well the operation handles surge volume.
What is ABC slotting and why does it matter for peak season?
ABC slotting groups SKUs by velocity: A for the fastest movers, C for the slowest. Fast movers are placed closer to pack stations to cut picker travel, but spread across aisles so pickers aren't crowding into one area. It reduces pick time while avoiding the congestion that creates new bottlenecks at peak volume.
What is the first sign a carrier is falling behind?
A gap in tracking scans. If packages were handed to a carrier the night before and no new scan events appear by morning, something is wrong, often a capacity issue at a specific hub. Contact the carrier first, then be ready to shift volume to another carrier if the delay is confirmed.
How many carriers should a brand use during peak season?
More than one. Carrier delays during peak season are common and usually regional, so having volume already flowing through several carriers makes it possible to reroute without setting up anything new under pressure. A fulfillment provider with carrier relationships already integrated can throttle volume across carriers on the brand's behalf.
Should brands update their forecast during Black Friday weekend?
Yes. Peak season runs two to three weeks and the first day rarely matches the forecast. Brands should send updated expectations to the warehouse after day one, including any marketing pushes planned for the following days, so staffing can be adjusted before the volume arrives rather than after.
Does splitting inventory across multiple warehouses help with peak volume?
Only if the inventory is balanced to the forecast in each building. Unbalanced inventory leads to stockouts in one location and long-zone shipping from another, which raises cost and transit time on the orders the multi-location strategy was meant to improve.
Where your peak season plan stands
If your inventory is still in transit, your forecast hasn't been updated since September, or your shipping promise hasn't been looked at for Black Friday week, there is still time to close those gaps. ShipNetwork has run peak season for ecommerce brands since 2001, and my team would rather hear from you now than the week of.