The discount comes off a Black Friday order on day one. The rest of its cost reaches the accounts over the next two months, and most of it is decided in advance.
If your business sends parcels, the run-up to Christmas is already on the desk: a peak surcharge notice from a carrier, a temporary staffing budget, a marketing plan built around one Friday in November. Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November, and the sales report will show the revenue within days.
The margin takes longer to show. Fulfilment, customer service, freight and returns costs come in over the following weeks, and some only appear in January’s figures, long after the campaign has been reported as a success.
The businesses I work with that protect their peak margin treat it as a planning job: they settle their carrier plan, delivery promise, invoice checks and return terms early, because each of those decisions shapes a cost that turns up later.
The order: extra volume for five weeks
On the nShift platform, Black Friday carried more than twice the shipments of an ordinary Friday in early November, two years running. nShift’s Black Friday and peak season data also shows how much that varies by country: across seven nShift sending markets, Black Week 2025 (24 to 30 November) shipment uplift ranged from 44% above an average week for shipments from Finland to 112% for the UK.
Black Friday itself carries only part of the load: on our platform in 2025, the peak ran for about five weeks, from 17 November to 21 December, and the busiest day was Cyber Monday, with 8% more shipments than Black Friday. Of the shipments above an average early-November week, 60% went out before or after Black Week.
Dispatch: carrier capacity is agreed in advance
Each carrier agrees how many parcels it will collect from you each day, and in the week after Black Friday that number decides whether an order leaves on time. When orders run above it, parcels wait in the warehouse or move to a faster, more expensive service so the delivery date holds; either way, the cost of the order goes up after the price was set.
Carriers also get blamed at peak for delays that started before collection. The order cut-off, pick and pack and the collection slot all draw on the same hours, so a warehouse that falls behind on a busy day hands the carrier parcels that are already late.
Confirm the daily collection numbers with each carrier in October, against your own campaign forecast rather than a general one, and check that your cut-off times still hold at peak volumes. Then agree a second option for your busiest routes, so the orders above that number still go out as promised.
The delivery promise: a missed date becomes a support cost
The delivery date shown at checkout is a promise, and peak makes it harder to keep. In Ofcom’s 2025 research on parcel deliveries, more than two thirds (68%) of UK parcel recipients had experienced a delivery issue in the past six months, and delivery delays were the most common (28%). When a parcel runs late and nobody tells the customer, the customer asks, and each ‘where is my order?’ email or call takes staff time in the busiest weeks of the year for your customer service team.
The cheaper option is to promise only what the operation can deliver at peak volumes, and to send an update before the customer has to ask.
The carrier invoice: the real freight cost comes in December
The carrier invoice for November’s parcels is issued weeks after they were delivered. Unlike a supplier invoice, it usually has no purchase order to match against, so checking it means comparing each line with the rate you agreed and the record of what was sent. Peak invoices are longer, and they carry more of the lines that need checking: surcharges, weight adjustments and service changes.
What I see at peak is that the payment falls due before anyone has had time to go through the invoice line by line, so it gets paid as billed. Published freight audit benchmarks put recoverable overcharges at 3 to 7% of freight spend.
Decide now who checks the invoices, against which records, and how disputes are raised. At nShift we built our invoice audit software to do that matching line by line, but a finance team without it can still check a sample of December’s invoices by hand and see whether a fuller check is worth the time.
The return: the last cost comes after Christmas
In nShift’s 2024 data, returns peaked on 27 December at 49% above an average Friday. A return reverses the sale and adds a second journey, a second round of handling and, often, a refund to process, all after the campaign has closed.
Return terms are fixed when the customer buys: the return window, any charge and whether the customer can swap the item instead of taking a refund, which keeps the sale on the books. In research IMRG carried out for nShift with 1,000 UK shoppers in April 2026, 66.1% said they would likely take an easy exchange instead of a refund if one were offered.
What to settle before the campaign starts
I would want each of these agreed before the campaign calendar is fixed:
- Carrier plan (operations): daily collection numbers confirmed against your own forecast, with a second option for the busiest routes.
- Delivery promise (ecommerce and operations together): an estimate at checkout the operation can meet at peak, and updates sent before customers ask.
- Invoice checks (finance): a named owner, the agreed rates and shipment records to hand, and a process for raising disputes.
- Return terms (ecommerce): a clear return window, any charges and an exchange option, all easy to find before the customer buys.
Then, in January, I would compare what each peak order cost against what it earned, with the December invoices and the post-Christmas returns included, and plan next year’s campaign from that figure.
About the author
Gary Carlile is EVP, Customer Growth at nShift, the global leader in multi-carrier shipping and delivery experience. His team works with retailers, brands and logistics providers across Europe on the platform behind their checkout, shipping, tracking and returns, which connects to more than 1,000 carriers and supports over one billion shipments a year. Gary has 30 years of experience in logistics and ecommerce fulfilment, from carrier management to consumer-goods distribution, and has held international leadership roles at Consignor and nShift for a decade.
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