Industry Insights
Peak Season Exposes Every Crack in Your Shipping Operation
Every year, peak season arrives with the same promise—and the same risk.
Sales surge. Volume spikes. Teams move fast. Decisions get compressed. And shipping becomes the backbone of the customer experience.
It's also the moment when the smallest gaps in visibility turn into the biggest financial leaks.
Peak season doesn't create problems—it reveals them
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the weeks that follow don't introduce new shipping issues. They amplify the ones that already exist.
During peak:
- Shipments increase exponentially
- Carrier service levels fluctuate
- Accessorials spike
- Fulfillment partners operate under pressure
- Billing lag stretches even further
What feels manageable at normal volume becomes untraceable at scale.
And the cost of not knowing rises just as fast as order volume.
The economic backdrop makes this year different
In 2025, peak season planning isn't happening in a vacuum.
Brands are navigating:
- Persistent inflation pressure
- Uncertain consumer demand
- Tightened margins
- Ongoing global volatility
That means there's less room for error—and far less tolerance for unexplained costs.
Every dollar matters more. Every adjustment gets scrutinized. Every delayed answer carries risk.
Yet this is exactly when visibility is hardest to maintain.
Where the biggest leaks actually happen
Most peak season losses don't come from obvious failures.
They come from:
- Misapplied rate cards at high volume
- Accessorials that quietly compound
- Billing adjustments discovered weeks too late
- Disputes that miss submission windows
- Decisions made without shipment-level context
By the time invoices arrive in January, the opportunity to act has already passed.
Peak season leakage isn't loud. It's cumulative.
Why spreadsheets break at peak
Many teams still rely on exports and manual checks to understand shipping spend.
That approach collapses under peak volume.
When thousands of shipments move across multiple carriers and 3PLs:
- Manual reconciliation slows down
- Errors multiply
- Teams lose confidence in their own numbers
Worse, the data needed to explain costs becomes harder to reconstruct after the fact.
Peak season demands real-time understanding—not retrospective cleanup.
How RateRunners supports peak readiness
RateRunners was built with peak season in mind.
By aligning shipments, billing, and partners in a shared system, RateRunners helps teams:
- See cost drivers as volume increases
- Track variances while decisions still matter
- Maintain clarity across brands, 3PLs, and carriers
- Enter peak with confidence—not guesswork
Instead of waiting for invoices to tell the story, teams can understand what's happening as it unfolds.
Peak is where clarity matters most
High volume doesn't just increase revenue—it magnifies every assumption in your operation.
The teams that perform best during peak aren't the ones moving fastest. They're the ones seeing most clearly.
As peak season approaches, the question isn't whether shipping will get more complex.
It will.
The question is whether you'll understand it when it does.