This year’s holiday shopping season is 6 days shorter than 2018. Are you prepared?

Black Friday through Cyber Monday continues to be the busiest days for shopping in the United States. In 2018 alone, online sales during Black Friday reached a total of $6.2 billion, growing 23.6% year-over-year. 

Despite predictions that the threat of another economic slowdown could impact holiday sales from November through January, this season’s retail sales are expected to rise up to 5%, exceeding $1.1 trillion.* That’s a potential increase of 1.9% growth in 2019.

While time will tell whether this prediction is true, there are a few things you can do to prepare your store for the best holiday season yet. In fact, we put together a holiday shipping guide that provides useful tips on how to create a strategy that converts your customers.

For this guide, we analyzed data from our top performing merchants, in addition to shipping rate request information from customers during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2018.

Through this analysis, we discovered trends including:

• Countries outside the United States where BFCM sales are growing
• Industries where delivery options like LTL freight and same day are common practice
• Peak days and times for online shopping during and leading up to BFCM
• Common shipping strategies used by merchants, like dimensional packing and in-store pickup

This year’s holiday shopping season is six days shorter than 2018. Keeping this in mind, it’s more important than ever that you have a shipping strategy that entices your customers to choose your online store over a competitors’, including Amazon.