Peak Season Preparedness: Part 1 of 4
There is a slightly uncomfortable question worth asking before Black Friday.
If twice as many orders landed tomorrow, could you actually ship them?
Not eventually. Not after everyone stays late and someone gets sent out to buy another roll of tape.
Could your current operation pick, pack, label and dispatch them within the delivery promise your customers saw at checkout?
Peak season has a habit of exposing problems that stay hidden during normal trading. A packing process that feels fine at 300 orders a day can become painfully slow at 800. A packaging SKU that usually lasts three weeks disappears in four days. Carrier collections fill up. Temporary staff need more help than expected. Small delays start stacking on top of each other.
The good news is that most of this can be tested before the orders arrive.
Peak planning starts with capacity, not sales
It is easy to focus on the exciting number.
How many orders are we expecting?
The more useful question is:
How many orders can we actually dispatch?
Black Friday remains heavily weighted towards ecommerce. PwC estimated UK Black Friday spending at £6.4 billion in 2025, with more than two-thirds of spending taking place online for home delivery.
Parcel networks see the impact immediately. During the 2024 Christmas peak, Evri reported delivering 173 million parcels in nine weeks, including 24.7 million parcels in its busiest week.
You cannot control the wider network. You can control what happens between an order hitting your system and the parcel leaving your building.
That starts with some fairly simple maths.
Work out your real orders-per-hour capacity
Forget the best packing rate you have ever seen. Measure a normal one.
Take a representative hour during a normal working day and record how many completed orders leave the packing area. Include the whole process:
- Picking
- Moving stock
- Preparing the packaging
- Packing the product
- Adding paperwork or inserts
- Adding void fill where needed
- Sealing
- Applying the shipping label
- Sorting the finished parcel
If ten people are involved in getting an order out of the building, measuring one fast packer at a bench will tell you very little about your actual capacity.
A simple example
Suppose your operation currently processes 60 completed orders per hour and you have 8 productive dispatch hours per day.
Your practical daily capacity is around:
60 × 8 = 480 orders
Now suppose your Black Friday forecast is 750 orders. You have a gap of 270 orders per day.
You can run these numbers in our Peak Season Readiness Calculator if you would rather not do it by hand.
At that point, the planning conversation becomes useful:
- Can you extend operating hours?
- Can another packing position be opened?
- Would extra staff increase output, or simply queue behind the same bottleneck?
- Could part of the packing process be removed?
- Can carrier collections accommodate the extra volume?
The answer may be a combination. What matters is finding the gap now.
More people do not always mean more parcels
This catches businesses out every peak.
Order volumes climb, so more people get added to the warehouse. It feels logical. Sometimes it works.
Sometimes five extra people arrive and discover there are still only three packing benches, two label printers and one person who knows where everything is.
Labour only increases capacity when the process around it can absorb the extra people.
Before adding temporary staff, look at the physical journey of an order through your operation. Ask:
- Where do people wait?
- Where do orders queue?
- Where does stock run out?
- What equipment gets shared?
- Which jobs require an experienced member of staff?
- Which tasks take longer than everyone thinks they do?
You are looking for the constraint. Fixing one genuine constraint can have a bigger impact than simply adding another pair of hands.
Run a peak stress test before peak
One of the simplest tests is to deliberately put your operation under pressure for an hour.
Pick a representative batch of orders and process them at the rate you expect during peak. Do not change the process just for the test. Use your normal benches, normal packaging, normal equipment and the people who would realistically be doing the work.
Then watch.
- Look for orders waiting between stages.
- Watch how often someone leaves their station to collect something.
- Time packaging preparation.
- See how frequently consumables need replenishing.
- Check whether labels, scanners and printers keep pace.
- Watch what happens when an unusual order appears.
Then ask the team one question: What slowed you down?
They will usually know.
Look at the whole dispatch process, not just packing speed
Packing is an obvious place to look for lost time, but it is only one stage.
A peak readiness review should follow an order from the moment it becomes available for fulfilment to the moment it is ready for collection.
Order released → pick → consolidate → packaging make-ready → pack → seal → label → sort → carrier collection
Packaging make-ready means the actions needed to turn a flat or unprepared pack into something ready to receive the product.
Put a rough time or capacity against each stage. You may find your pack benches can comfortably process 100 orders an hour but picking only supplies 65.
In that situation, faster packing equipment does not solve the immediate problem.
The same applies further downstream. There is little benefit processing 1,500 orders during the day if your carrier arrangement only has capacity for 1,000 parcels.
Peak planning works best when you treat dispatch as one connected system.
Check your packaging before the rush starts
Packaging shortages are particularly frustrating.
You can have products, customers and warehouse staff ready to go, then find that one low-cost item is stopping a high-value order from leaving the building.
For each packaging format you use every day, record:
- Current stock: what is physically available now?
- Typical daily usage: how quickly do you normally consume it?
- Expected peak usage: what happens when the order mix changes?
- Supplier lead time: how long does replenishment really take?
- Reorder point: when must the next order be placed?
- Alternative pack: what will you use if the preferred format runs out?
That final point matters.
If your normal mailing box disappeared tomorrow, what would you use?
For stock packaging, an alternative size may be easy to source. Custom printed or structurally bespoke packaging needs more planning. Manufacturing time, board availability, print, conversion, delivery and minimum production quantities all affect how quickly replacement stock can arrive.
We will cover packaging forecasting properly in Part 2 of this series.
For now, the goal is simple: do not make your peak plan dependent on a packaging delivery arriving exactly when expected.
Do the same exercise with consumables
Boxes get most of the attention. The boring things can stop a packing line just as effectively.
- Tape and sealing consumables
- Shipping labels and printer ribbons
- Void fill
- Document wallets and paperwork
- Glue and other packing consumables
- Batteries and charging equipment
- Cleaning and maintenance supplies
Anything your operation consumes needs a basic peak stock check.
It sounds mundane. Running out of labels at 3pm on Cyber Monday is considerably less mundane.
Find out what your carriers need from you
Do not assume your normal collection automatically scales with your order forecast.
Speak to your carrier or account manager before peak and ask about:
- Daily collection capacity
- Extra vehicle requirements
- Trailer, cage or pallet requirements
- Collection cut-off times
- Weekend collections
- Christmas delivery cut-offs
- What happens if forecast volume is exceeded
- Backup arrangements
This conversation matters even more if your promotional calendar is likely to create sharp spikes rather than a gradual increase in orders.
Your warehouse may be ready. The collection waiting outside it needs to be ready too.
Be realistic about temporary labour
Peak staff can add useful capacity, but only after they know what they are doing.
A complicated packing process that works with experienced warehouse staff can fall apart when several new people need to learn it in one morning.
Look for tasks that require judgement:
- Choosing the correct box
- Deciding how much void fill to use
- Building complex cartons
- Applying tape in a particular way
- Selecting inserts
- Handling exceptions
The more decisions a packer has to make, the harder it becomes to maintain consistent output when the team changes.
Clear work instructions help. Making the process simpler before temporary staff arrive helps more.
Check the promise you are making customers
Operations and marketing need to talk to each other before peak.
A successful promotion can create an operational problem surprisingly quickly.
If your normal website message promises same-day dispatch for orders received before 3pm, ask whether that still works when daily order volume doubles.
The answer might be yes. Great.
If it is no, change the promise before customers start ordering.
A realistic delivery message is far better than thousands of customers wondering why their parcel has not shipped.
The same goes for customer service. More orders usually mean more delivery queries, address changes, cancellations, returns questions and exceptions. Make sure the people answering them know what customers have been promised.
Create a Plan B before you need one
Peak planning should include things going wrong. Not dramatic disaster scenarios. Normal things.
- A packaging delivery is delayed.
- A printer stops working.
- Someone calls in sick.
- A carrier collection is missed.
- One product sells far faster than forecast.
- The internet connection drops.
- A packing station becomes unusable.
Ask a simple question for each major part of your dispatch operation:
If this stops working tomorrow, what do we do?
Write the answer down. A basic fallback that everyone understands is far more useful than trying to invent one at 5pm with several hundred orders waiting.
Q4 Peak Season Readiness Calculator for Ecommerce
All of the maths in this article can be done on the back of an envelope. We built a calculator so you do not have to.
The Peak Season Readiness Calculator uses the same three numbers from the example above and tells you, in about five minutes, whether your dispatch operation can cope with what you are forecasting.
You enter:
- Forecast peak orders per day: what you expect to dispatch on your busiest days
- Completed orders per hour: your real measured rate across the whole process, not one fast packer at a bench
- Productive dispatch hours per day: the hours actually available once breaks, handovers and exceptions are taken out
- Planned peak dispatch hours: optional, if you are extending shifts for Black Friday
It gives you back:
- Your estimated daily dispatch capacity
- Your capacity gap in orders per day
- Your capacity utilisation as a percentage
- The operational areas most likely to slow you down
Nothing to download, no signup, and nothing sent to your inbox unless you ask for it.
If the number comes back comfortable, you have one less thing to worry about in November. If it comes back short, you have found the gap while there is still time to close it.
Find out if you can ship your forecast
One final test
There is an easy way to find out whether this exercise has worked.
Ask someone outside the management team:
“If orders doubled tomorrow, what would stop us shipping them?”
If everyone gives roughly the same answer, you probably understand your constraint.
If you get five completely different answers, there is more work to do.
That is exactly what September and October are for.
Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November, followed by Cyber Monday on 30 November.
There is still time to test the operation, fix obvious bottlenecks, build packaging stock and agree capacity with suppliers and carriers.
That is considerably cheaper than finding the problems when the orders are already sitting in your system.
Need another pair of eyes on your peak packaging?
Packaging should help your dispatch operation, not become the thing slowing it down.
The Packaging Club works with ecommerce brands and fulfilment operations on everything from everyday stock packaging through to bespoke packaging, pack-bench reviews and higher-volume ecommerce formats.
If you are reviewing packaging ahead of peak, get in touch with The Packaging Club and we can take a look at what you are currently using.
References
PwC UK, UK consumers set to spend £6.4bn this Black Friday, 21 November 2025.
Evri, Evri reports best-ever Christmas and peak trading, 3 January 2025. Evri reported 173 million parcels delivered during the nine weeks to 28 December 2024 and 24.7 million parcels during its busiest week.
Royal Mail, Seasonal trends to help you plan for your peak, 17 September 2024.
